How anarchists, syndicalists, socialists and IWW militants were drawn to Bolshevism: four case studies

“The
unity of thought and action gave Bolshevism its original power; without
entering into doctrinal questions we can define Bolshevism as a movement to the
left of socialism -- which brought it closer to anarchism -- inspired by the will to
achieve the revolution immediately.”[1]

These words of Victor Serge sum up a whole new wave of thinking that came over
many anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, and socialists with the onset of the
Russian Revolution. Many anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists who had been
hostile to the practices of organized socialist parties for decades found
themselves drawn to the example of the Bolshevik Revolution and joined the
emerging Communist Parties, providing them with valuable cadres. One of these
men was Victor Serge, a Russian exile most noted for his later work as a
novelist. Another was Bill Haywood, an American trade unionist active in both
the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World. A
third was James P. Cannon, another trade union militant in the USA. A fourth was
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian journalist and political activist.

On the surface though, it seems that
Bolshevism has little in common with anarcho-syndicalism. Bolsheviks were
committed to political action, whereas syndicalists focused wholly on trade
unions. The Bolsheviks were dedicated revolutionary Marxists, syndicalists on
the other hand came out of an anarchist milieu in reaction to the reformism of
the socialists and rarely had coherent doctrines. Syndicalists were also
outside of the Socialist International, seeing the organization as elitist,
while the Bolsheviks were proud members. Furthermore, the socialists were used
to merely spouting revolutionary rhetoric while the Bolsheviks acted on it.

It seems that with all these
differences that Bolsheviks could never come to any form of unity with
syndicalists or socialists. However, during World War One and carrying over to
the Bolshevik Revolution, many syndicalists and socialists joined up with the
emerging Communist Parties. This union of syndicalists and socialists with
communists is an example of what Michael Lowy calls elective affinity. Elective
affinity is a relationship between two social trends that starts “from a
certain structural analogy, the relationship consists of a convergence, a
mutual attraction, an active confluence, a combination that can go as far as a
fusion.”[2]
For the most part, the relationship between anarcho-syndicalists and Bolsheviks
has been viewed as one of distrust, if not of hatred. Socialist Parties would
later try to paint the Bolsheviks as hotheads, while they were practical. Yet
in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, none of this was true.
Syndicalists and socialists such as Victor Serge, Bill Haywood, James Cannon
and Antonio Gramsci found themselves drawn to the Bolsheviks based on the
failure of syndicalists and socialists to confront the First World War; they
were drawn to the success of the Bolsheviks, which was based on its concept of
the party, revolutionary praxis and the example of soviets.

I. The World Capitalist Economy and the Second
International

The emergence of Bolshevism and
syndicalism took place in the shadow of Europe and the USA’s expansion on the
eve of the First World War. This was the era of monopoly capitalism and
imperialism. The European powers and the USA were expanding across the globe
and industrial concerns were concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. For
instance, in the USA, “in 1908, the seven largest trusts controlled 1,638
companies.”[3] These
trends were similar in France, Britain, and Germany, albeit not quite as
marked. The increase in monopolies led to the export of capital and imperial
expansion across the globe. Capital investments in 1914 came primarily from
only three countries, Britain, Germany and France. For example, in 1914 “43
percent [of capital investment came] from Britain alone, 20 percent from
France, 13 percent from Germany.”[4] The
expansion of capitalism abroad led to hundreds of millions of people in Africa
and Asia being brought under the colonial jackboot. Protecting these
investments brought with it a ballooning of militarism with each imperial power
ready to defend with arms its capital investments. The inevitable clash between
the European powers would come in 1914.[5]

However, the mushrooming of
capitalism in Europe and America didn’t just lead to profits and imperial
glory. Greater concentrations of capital led to an expansion and greater
concentrations of the proletariat. In Germany, from 1895 to 1907, the number of
workers increased from 5.9 million to 8.6 million. In France, the working class
increased from 3 million workers circa 1900 to 5 million in 1914. In the USA
workers in factories went from 2 million in 1870 to 8.4 million in 1919.[6]
In these countries, the concentration of capital led to the concentration of
more workers. For example, “France in 1906 one-tenth of the wage-earning labor
force was employed in companies having more than 500 wage earners; in the
United States the average number of wage earners for each industrial company
rose from twenty-two in 1899 to forty in 1919.”[7]
These trends were less marked in some countries, but in general the proletariat
across Europe and the USA was growing.

The working class was not merely growing
in terms of economics. The proletariat was also building unions and parties
that counted the allegiance of millions. The major workers Marxist movement was
the Second (or Socialist) International formed in 1889 which included parties
across Europe and the world. The Second International had millions of members
and profound influence across Europe and the USA.[8]
As capitalism grew across Europe, the parties of the Second International held
aloft a different vision of the future, promising a revolutionary socialist
tomorrow.

While the socialist parties claimed
to uphold a revolutionary program, their actions were decidedly conservative.
However, the Second International adhered to a fatalistic view of Marxism on
the question of the inevitability of socialism. This type of Marxism took away
revolutionary praxis, replacing it “with a certainty, akin to that once given
by religion, that science demonstrated the historical inevitability of their
[workers] eventual triumph.”[9] If
socialism was inevitable because of certain historical laws, then there was no
need to engage in revolutionary action to bring about socialism.[10]

However, if socialism wasn’t to be
brought about by revolutionary action then what was the role of the socialist
parties? These parties were rapidly expanding in the early 1900s, capturing
significant numbers of the electorate and bringing them close to state power.
For example, the largest and most influential socialist party was to be found
in Germany. In the early 1900s, the party “went from triumph to triumph. In
1890 the party sent thirty-five delegates to the Reichstag. Twenty-two years
later almost one fourth of the members of the national parliament, 110 in all,
were Social Democrats.”[11]
The success of socialist parties at the ballot box seemed to pose a
contradiction. If the socialist party was “a revolutionary party, but it is not
a party that makes revolutions,” what was it to do?[12]

One of the potential answers to this
question was provided by German Socialist leader Eduard Bernstein. From 1896-8,
Bernstein wrote a series of articles (later collected into a book Evolutionary Socialism) which called for
a major revision of Marxist theory. Bernstein believed “that capitalism was
becoming prone less to economic crises because cartels and monopolies, the
increased speed of communication, and the growth of the credit system all
weakened the anarchic tendencies of the market.”[13]
If capitalism wasn’t prone to collapse, according to orthodox theory, what role
then for the socialist party? Bernstein believed that in light of these new
conditions the socialist party should “amend its theory so that it aligned with
its practice and could declare itself a democratic party of social reform.”[14]
Bernstein argued ultimately for ditching Marxism and concentrating on piecemeal
reforms.[15]

Although, Bernstein’s ideas were
voted down by the Socialist leadership on several occasions, that was not the
end of the matter.[16]
Despite the verbal commitment of the socialist party to revolution, its
practice seemed to be in accord with Bernstein’s theory (both in Germany and
internationally). According to David Renton, “the SPD settled for a means of
operating that emphasized parliament as the main place where change would
happen. Ironically, then, the result of Eduard Bernstein’s seeming defeat was
that his ideas triumphed.”[17]
The International’s adopting Bernstein’s theories of reform in practice led to
“compromise, passivity, the refusal to order the mobilized armies of labor into
action, and the suppression of the struggles which spontaneously welled up
among the masses, in the miserable name of organizational discipline.”[18]
The end result of Bernstein’s theories and the Second International’s
fatalistic view of Marxism was capitulation to the capitalist state and support
for the slaughter of World War One.[19]

II. The Syndicalist
Challenge to the Second International in France and Spain

Although the reformist practice of
the official Socialist parties was the dominant trend, two opposition movements
developed. One of these groups were the antirevisionist leftists that existed
within the parties of the Second International.[20]
However, the largest opposition were revolutionaries known as syndicalists
(coming from the French word for trade unions) who developed outside of the official
Second International and were dedicated to radical practice.

Syndicalists developed out of
anarchism and believed that “direct action by the working class outside
parliament could achieve the revolution; and such action could only be
undertaken by genuine workers…the way in which such a movement could express
itself was by the means of the general strike.”[21]
This idea spread across Europe and the USA in the late 1890s and early 1900s. A
French anarchist named Fernand Peloutier argued for turning unions into
“practical schools of anarchism.”[22]
A major French theorist named Geoges Sorel advocated the syndicalist tactics.
In 1908, Sorel put down his definitive views on syndicalism in a work entitled,
Reflections on Violence. Sorel’s work
would prove to be a major influence on syndicalism. In Reflections, Sorel argued that general strikes should be seen as a
myth which “more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires,
passions, and mental activity.”[23]
Rather than accepting a fatalistic view of history, Sorel was calling for
revolutionary action. Sorel also believed that the violence of strikes and
class struggle “may engender the elements of a new civilization suited to a
people of producers…this philosophy is closely bound up with the apology for
violence.”[24] In
other words, if the general strike is the mobilizing myth designed to bring on
the social revolution, then the struggle and violence will forge the working
class for socialism.[25]
Suffice it to say, this view is sharply opposed to any reformist road to
socialism.

The views on syndicalism of the
dominant socialist parties were decidedly negative. For example, Sorel
criticizes the hypocrisy of the parliamentary socialists, “the emancipation of
the working class must be the work of the workers themselves-their newspapers
repeat this everyday-but real emancipation consists in voting for a
professional politician, in securing for him the means of obtaining a
comfortable situation in the world, in subjecting oneself to a leader.”[26]
Another syndicalist in the US, William Foster sarcastically criticized
socialists officeholders who “once in office these politicians fritter away
their time with various vote-catching schemes, such as the reduction of taxes,
‘clean government,’ ‘social peace,’ etc., while the working class is starving.”[27]
Instead, Foster and Sorel urged some form of direct action on the trade union
front rather than political action.

For the revolutionary Victor Serge,
he was shaped heavily by the experiences of syndicalists and socialists of
France and Spain. It will be useful to look at the leftist movements of these
two countries before turning to how Serge responded to them. In France,
syndicalism took root in the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) in 1906.
The syndicalist takeover of the CGT came about amidst a rise in labor unrest
and disgust among the reformist socialists. French socialism had been wracked
by controversy when one of its members, Alexander Millerand joined a
left-center cabinet during the Dreyfus Affair. The French Socialist movement
had been fragmented for decades and the Millerand appointment was a new cause
to draw swords.[28] The
government was meant to restore republican unity during the Dreyfus years,
however it “remained a bourgeois government. When the Chalons workers went on
strike, it too called in the army.”[29]
The idea of a socialist in a government that shot down workers was revolting to
many revolutionaries.

Industrial unrest grew in France,
leading to a growth in syndicalist influence. France’s main labor federation,
the General Confederation of Workers, was taken over by syndicalists in 1906,
believing that “the proletariat must refuse all support from the opposing
class.”[30]
The syndicalist takeover coincided in the years after 1907 with “a postal strike,
a railway strike, and numerous others, shook the bourgeoisie, though without
producing many effective benefits for the working class.”[31]
There may’ve been benefits from the syndicalist strikes, but there was not a
revolution.

When World War One broke out in
1914, the major syndicalist union CGT proved to be impotent in fomenting
revolution. For one thing, there were seven million workers in France and only
600,000 were part of the CGT. The failure of the syndicalists to act is
attributed in part by the historian James Joll to the reading that “in the SFIO
[French Socialist Party] and CGT there were strong minorities opposed to the
general strike against war.”[32]
Furthermore, the moderates in both the unions and party were looking for
immediate benefits and “if the Sorelian myth of the general strike was to
operate successfully, it must produce a unanimous and simultaneous élan in
which nobody felt any inhibitions.”[33]
The divisions in the CGT led to a collapse of any revolutionary opposition and
soon the leader of the organization, Leon Jouhaux was supporting the tricolor.
According to Eric Hobsbawm, “many of them (e.g. among ‘revolutionary
syndicalists’) joined the bulk of Marxist social democrats in the rush to the
patriotic banners.”[34]
So little was the French government scared of antiwar disruptions among the
syndicalists that the “Minister of the Interior, Malvy, decided to pay no
attention to the Carnet B., i.e. to leave at liberty the very men who, in the
government’s opinion, had convincingly established their intention to oppose
war by all means.”[35]
In short, the revolutionaries of the CGT had more bark than bite.[36]

South of France, Spain was another
country where syndicalism took root. Unlike many other countries in Europe,
Spain was not a developed capitalist society but had a powerful landowning
class and a monarchy. Spain was burdened with a large landowning class, a small
bourgeoisie, and a large peasantry.[37]
Since capitalist development was delayed in Spain, its working class was small
but highly combative and influenced heavily by anarchist and syndicalist ideas.[38]
Spain did have a small socialist party, but it believed that “the class
struggle should be waged in a moderate and evolutionary manner (the PSOE did
not formally repudiate the monarchy until 1914).”[39]
Needless to say such a moderate course did not find too many adherents among
the militant workers of Spain. Following major labor strife in Barcelona in
1908-9, a national workers federation was founded in 1910. The National
Confederation of Labor (CNT) was dominated by anarchists from the beginning and
influenced by “ideas from France, the articulate leaders of whose working class
were in the full flood of enthusiasm for ‘syndicalism’ and the idea of economic
warfare to the death.”[40]
The CNT pursued a revolutionary strategy of strikes, riots, and sabotage that
they hoped would lead to a new society.

The CNT expanded rapidly over the
next several years, engaging in desperate struggles on behalf of the working
class. However, it was the outbreak of World War One that saw the CNT make a
bid for power. Spain was neutral during the war, supplying vast amounts of raw
materials to the allies. The consequence was a vast enrichment of
industrialists and stagnation for the wages and conditions of the working
class. Following the conclusion of the war, exports to the Allies suddenly
dropped off and unemployment swelled. People were swarming into the cities, but
there was no work to be found. The established politicians offered no
solutions. Protests largely came from the Anarchist trade unions (CNT) which
staged major protests in Barcelona and Andalucia from 1917-1920. The government
sent in the police to crush strikes and assassinate union leaders. The Russian
Revolution also inspired great hope in the left.[41]
Radicalized elements in both anarchist and socialist movements took the Russian
example as the wave of the future and broke with their organizations.

III.
Victor Serge

It was in this
environment that Victor Serge was forged. Serge was one of the most famous
anarchists (and semi-syndicalists) who went over to the Bolshevik revolution.
Serge (Kibalchich) was born in 1891 in Belgium to exiled Russian
revolutionaries.[42] Serge
grew up in poverty, suffering hunger at an early age. Serge’s father passed on
his revolutionary beliefs to his son. Serge entered the workforce during his
fifteenth year, laboring for ten hours or more. During his adolescence, Serge
befriended a group of young rebels. Serge describes his friends as “lean young
wolves, full of pride and thought: dangerous types. We had a certain fear of
becoming careerists, as we considered many of our elders to be who had made
some show of being revolutionary, and afterwards…”[43]
Suffice to say, Serge and his friends were not inclined toward the gradualist
methods that were taking hold in the socialist parties.

Despite Serge’s revolutionary
temperament, he entered into the Belgian Socialist Youth. Serge had a different
view of socialism than the party though. He believed that “socialism gave a
meaning to life, and that was: struggle.”[44]
This revolutionary edge put him in conflict with the party, “we had satisfied
ourselves with a Socialism of battle, and it was the great age of reformism.”[45]
Serge later left the party, when its leader Vandervelde “advocated the
annexation of the Congo.”[46]
Following his departure from the socialist party, Serge became an active
anarchist. Serge did not turn to syndicalism, but towards a form of anarchist
individualism that involved “vegetarianism, and participating in illegalist
activity.”[47]
Illegalist anarchism believed that “the ballot revealed itself to be a paper
rag.”[48]
The individualists believed that they had the choice between “wage earners or
bandits. We can’t do much about this.”[49]
In such a situation, Serge decided that he was “with the bandits…The bandits
demonstrate their determination to live.”[50]
Following these convictions, Serge moved to France and became a supporter of
the Bonnot gang, a group of anarchists involved in bank robberies and
shootouts.

Serge was arrested in France in 1911
for a connection to a shoot-out. However, Serge was not involved in the
shootout, but he was a journalist who was “singled out as the intellectual
author of the Bonnot band’s crimes.”[51]
Serge was sentenced to a prison term that lasted from 1913 to 1917, where he
reflected on his worldview. Serge turned from his anarchist individualist
philosophy, believing that the Bonnot gang “was like a collective suicide.”[52]
Serge’s imprisonment coincided with the outbreak of World War One. To Serge, the
behavior of socialist parties and syndicalists supporting the war “was
incomprehensible to us. Did they then believe nothing of what they preached
yesterday?”[53] Serge
was caught up in the despair that had gripped many revolutionaries with the
outbreak of war.

Serge was released from jail in
early 1917 and told to leave France by the authorities. If he returned to the
country, Serge would once more by interned. Following his release from prison,
Serge made his way to Spain where he became involved with the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT, the largest union in the country. Serge’s involvement
with the CNT marked a definite change in his thinking. In 1910, Serge was
dismissive of syndicalism, believing that “organizing the working class in view
of social transformation means wasting time and energy.”[54]
However, his break with the individualists due to prison brought a change in
his thinking.

Serge was alive to the possibilities
that Spain offered to a revolutionary. He discussed all sorts of issues with
the syndicalists, “we examined the various problems: the Russian revolution,
the coming general strike…the ingrained anarchist hostility to any fresh forms
of organization.”[55]
In a letter to a friend around this time, Serge reflected on this change in his
thinking, “I have lost the sectarian intransigence of the past. I now attribute
less importance to words than ideas…I feel myself capable of working with all
those who, animated by the same desire for a better life…even by different
roads than mine and even if they give our common goal in reality different
names that I don’t know.”[56]
What we have is Serge claiming to be for the same goals as the past, namely a
new society, but trying new means to reach them. One of those means would be
the CNT and the general strike.

However, despite Serge’s
protestations that he was “still one of you” to the individualists, this was
hardly the case.[57] Serge
declared to the individualists that “you people are no longer good for
anything. You’re at the end of your tether: you won’t march for anything any
more-because you yourselves are not worth marching for.”[58]
Serge was animated by the atmosphere of the workers in Barcelona, which
“stimulated the workers to press their immediate demands.”[59]
Serge saw that “violent hopes were coming to birth.”[60]
Serge threw himself into the CNT and actively prepared for a general strike.

However, in the end the rising was
crushed and Serge had to flee the country.[61]
Serge had to reflect upon the failure of the syndicalists, so soon after his
experience with the individualists. Serge believed that the CNT “did not ask
any fundamental questions. It entered battle without knowing its ultimate
purpose or assessing the consequences of its action.”[62]
Serge felt that the militants were no more than “big children.”[63]
However, at the same time as the uprising in Spain, the Russian Revolution was
unfolding. Serge was growing increasingly attracted to this Revolution which he
believed “would not stop half-way.”[64]
Serge’s attitude toward the Bolsheviks is summed up with this comparison to the
anarchists during 1917 written many years later. For Serge, “what they [workers
and peasants] want, then the party expresses at a conscious level and carries
out. The party reveals to them what they have been thinking. It is the bond
which unites them from one end of the country to the other. The party is their
consciousness, their organization.”[65]
At this point, the Russian Revolution was quickly passing from its initial
bourgeois phase to the rising of the proletariat.

Like millions of others, Serge was
electrified by the Bolshevik triumph at the end of 1917. Serge had fled Spain
and now tried to reach Russia. Yet he suffered another bout in a French prison
from 1917-9 for breaking his deportation orders. Serge reflected on this period
in both his memoirs and the autobiographical novel, Birth of Our Power. During this period, Serge argued passionately
for the Bolshevik cause and “was ‘on the [party] line’ advocated by Lenin.”[66]
Serge argued with fellow prisoners, believing that “this victory is definitive,
as fragile and uncertain as it may be.”[67]
To him, “the basic theory is very clear: when the peasants have taken the land,
no power on earth will be able to pry it away from [them].”[68]
Serge was part of a small study circle that was entranced with Bolshevik ideas.
A sea change had come over the left with the Bolshevik revolution. To Serge,
“there is a technique of revolution, which demands organization, discipline,
watchwords, order. Persuasion before the conquest of power, yes: the competition
between false ideologies and the correct political line, the latter winning
over the masses because it best expresses their true aspirations (hence its
correctness).”[69] This
new wave extended over to the new society on the morrow of victory. Now Serge
believed in “Jacobin centralization…”[70]
Serge’s abrupt change in thinking was also influenced by his reading of Marx’s Civil War in France. Marx’s work dealt
with the failure of the Paris Commune and Serge believed that “a firm offensive
by the Communards against Versailles could probably have changed the course of
history…”[71] Where
the Commune had failed, Serge now wanted the Bolsheviks to succeed.

Despite Serge’s embrace of what
power meant for revolutionaries, that was not his only thinking on the Russian
Revolution. Serge desired “a libertarian, democratic revolution, without the
hypocrisy and flabbiness of the bourgeois democracies-egalitarian and tolerant
toward ideas and people, which would employ terror if it was necessary, but
would abolish the death penalty.”[72]
Serge’s new society rested on the “power of the Soviets the realization of our
deepest hopes.”[73] It was
on these convictions that Serge embraced Bolshevism. After the conclusion of
the war in 1918, Serge and other suspected Bolshevik prisoners in France were
exchanged for French prisoners in Russia. In 1919, Serge arrived in Russia for
the first time in his life and joined the Bolshevik Party.

In Serge’s transition, his anarchist
beliefs give way to a commitment to Marxism. Several important factors
attracted Serge to Bolshevism. Serge emphasized these factors in pamphlets
arguing with anarchists. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks were Marxists who took
“revolutionary theory [and] put [it] into practice.”[74]
The Revolution was also an example for workers in Europe, swept up in the war,
to follow. To Serge, “it gave them more than an example to follow, more than a
boundless source of hope; it gave them a body of doctrine, methods of struggle,
an education; it gave them leaders.”[75]
Since Serge believed that the Russian Revolution had based its theory on
reality, he criticized the anarchists (and syndicalists) for being “utopian, it
should be brought back to the reality of class struggle and its practical
necessities, though without losing anything of its ethical value for the
individual or for the social movement.”[76]
Serge believed that the Bolsheviks had accomplished what all shades of
anarchism had failed to do, bring about the revolution. The anarchists and
syndicalists had also failed their tests, whether in France in 1914 or in Spain
three years later.

Serge had now come away from his
earlier disdain of organization to a passionate embrace of political
organization. This was clearly shown in a later historical work on the
Bolshevik Revolution, where Serge stated “that the party fulfilled within the
working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system…Without it the
mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused
aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence--these, in the absence of a
mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action-doomed to waste
themselves--and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering.”[77]
This was a long journey for a man who had spent the formative years of his
youth decrying socialist organization. Now Serge saw socialist organization as
exemplified by the Bolsheviks as the only path toward revolution.

He admonished anarchists who shrank
from the harshness of the revolution, “that is how the revolution is. It is a
fact. It is not how we dreamed of it, nor what we wanted it to be. Here it is.
Are you against it-or with it?”[78]
Despite Serge’s seeming absolutist position, he urged anarchists who joined
communist parties to “preserve the spirit of liberty, which will give them a
greater critical spirit and a clearer awareness of their long term goals.”[79]
This was a vision of Leninism that Serge would remain faithful to for the rest
of his life despite his subsequent persecution.[80]

Former IWW militants James P. Cannon (centre) and Big Bill Haywood (right) at the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International, in Moscow in 1922.

IV. William “Big
Bill” Haywood and the US Labor Movement

In the United States, William “Big
Bill” Haywood made the transition from syndicalism to Bolshevism. Haywood was
born in 1869 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Haywood’s father, a Civil War veteran and
pony express rider, died around his third birthday. When Haywood was seven, his
mother remarried and he moved to the mining camp of Ophir. It was in Ophir that
Haywood encountered two things that would follow him throughout the rest of his
life: violence and mining. Shortly after moving to Ophir, Haywood saw a shootout
first hand where a man’s face was blown off. Another time, two of Haywood’s
classmates were killed by playing with a pistol. According to Haywood, all this
violence was “a natural part of life.”[81]
A young Haywood seemed to get used to this environment and admitted, “I used to
like to fight.”[82] Haywood
would later fight by other means once he entered politics and the labor
movement.

Haywood took a variety of jobs as a
young boy, working as a farm hand and in a family store. Despite Haywood’s
eagerness to fight, he did not approve of mob violence. At the age of twelve, a
black man who was accused of killing two men was being escorted to jail by the
police. Haywood witnessed a crowd gather and the police handed over their
prisoner to the mob. The mob hung the man with blood lust. Haywood said this
“was my first realization of what the insane cruelty of a mob could mean.”[83]
Later in life, Haywood was himself to be the victim of the actions of a mob.

Shortly thereafter, Haywood left
school and by the age of fifteen, he was working in the mines of Nevada. At the
mining camp of Rebel Creek, Haywood experienced long hours and harsh conditions
in a fairly isolated region. Yet Haywood said that the miners “were all great
readers.”[84] Haywood
formed close friendships with some of the men including Pat Reynolds, a member
of the Knights of Labor. Reynolds explained to the young Haywood the need for
workers to organize “for mutual protection.”[85]
Furthermore, Haywood was also deeply affected by news of the Haymarket bombing in
Chicago in 1886. Haywood described this as a “turning point in my life.”[86]

Before continuing with Haywood’s
development, it is necessary to explain the events that Haywood believed were a
turning point in his life. The Haymarket Affair and the rise of the Knights of
Labor were indeed turning points for the US proletariat. The Knights of Labor,
founded in 1871 was growing. For example, since 1881 the Knights had grown from
a membership low of roughly 20,000 to nearly 730,000 by 1886 despite a major
depression.[87] The
Knights of Labor also had a unique organizational structure for labor unions in
the US. The Knights “were open to workers in all occupations, of all
nationalities and races, and of both sexes.”[88]
The Knights also advocated a changing of the class system toward a “voluntary
cooperative order.”[89]
However, despite the Knight’s vague socialist ideology, they were quite
moderate in their tactics. Leaders of the Knights such as Terence Powderly
“usually disapproved of strikes as futile and harmful to hopes of social
reconciliation.”[90] The
Knights peak and its subsequent fall came with the eight-hour movement and the
Haymarket bombing.

In 1886, workers across the country
were gripped with a fever for an eight hour day. The hours for most workers
were long and hard, leaving little time for leisure. However, in 1886 labor
organizations across the USA pushed for an eight hour day that was argued
“would serve as a first step toward reducing unemployment and inducing a desire
for a higher standard of living among tradesmen with more leisure and more
desire to consume.”[91]
The strike for the eight hour day culminated on May 1, 1886 with more than
150,000 workers on strike across the USA. The strike fell short of expectations
of organizers but was still the largest nationwide strike in the USA up to that
time.[92]
Yet the May 1st strike was to be the peak of radical labor for quite
sometime. The Chicago strike wave was marked by violence against strikers and
the organization of a powerful anarchist movement. At a protest against police
brutality organized by the anarchists, the police charged the demonstration
after a bomb was thrown. The leaders of the anarchist movement in Chicago were
arrested and four were later executed.[93]

At the same time, the Knights of
Labor were also hitting a wall. During 1886, the Knights had their organization
on the railroads crushed. In the aftermath of the Haymarket Affair, the
employers and all levels of the US government began a concerted
counteroffensive against the Knights. According to historian Paul Buhle, the
Knights “leaders’ collective nerve failed. Badly shaken, calling off key
strikes despite workers’ determination to hold out, denouncing courageous
leaders as unfit to even be Knights, they sabotaged their own movement at its
moment of truth.”[94]
However, the Haymarket Affair also led to “a new wave of anti-labor
legislation” from state legislatures and “new efforts to strengthen local
police, militia and US armed forces.”[95]
State repression along with a failure of Knight leadership led to a decline of
radical labor and the rise of the conservative AFL.[96]

Following the Haymarket events, the
American labor movement was dominated by the American Federation of Labor
(AFL), a craft union founded in 1886 that disdained politics. The AFL founder
Samuel Gompers believed that “whatever benefits wage earners gained they would
have to get within the capitalist system. Taking up with radical movements
would only alienate the middle class.”[97]
The focus on craft organization caused the AFL to ignore the unskilled, women
and minorities who were left without union protection. This is a position that
Haywood would come to despise; he later took up the cause of the Knights and
the Chicago anarchists.[98]

Although Haywood was influenced by
the Knight Member Pat Reynolds and news from back east, he would not take the
plunge into radical labor for another decade. Haywood spent his time working in
various mines and trying to make it on a homestead. In 1896, after his arm was
injured on the job and he was unable to work, Haywood attended a meeting of the
Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Haywood heard the WFM’s President Edward
Boyce speak to the assembled miners. Haywood describes being interested in
hearing about the 1892 strike at Coeur d’Alenes in Idaho. After listening to
descriptions of the strike and repressions of labor, Haywood joined the WFM.[99]

Very quickly, Haywood was thrown
into the maelstrom of the WFM’s struggle against the mine owners. Out west,
“miners were working for corporate organizations under a whole new set of
restrictions and regulations, and piling up profits for absentee owners in what
was easily the most dangerous of America’s major industries.”[100]
The WFM owed its foundation to the 1892 D’Alene strike. Only a year before, the
miners had won a major wage increase. However, “in January 1892, the mine
owners shut down their mines and…announced a new wage scale that would wipe out
many of the gains won by the unions.”[101]
The local union refused the wage cut and declared a strike. Strikebreakers brought
in were persuaded by fellow workers to join the picket line. The union’s
success in mobilizing support led to the companies bringing in armed
strikebreakers and open fighting. Later even Federal troops were brought in to
keep the mines in operation. However, the suppression of the strike caused a
major scandal leading to a Congressional investigation and a release of the
men. In early 1893, the strike was won. However, the workers realized that they
needed to protect their gains so they pushed for a union that would guarantee
“better organization and more complete unity among the workers.”[102]
Out of this came the WFM.

However, D’Alene was only the
beginning of a major strike wave across the West that pitted worker against
capitalist. The WFM was originally part of the craft AFL, despite being an
industrial union. Initially the WFM “espoused only typical business union
goals, but repeated repression drove the WFM toward increasingly revolutionary
postures.”[103] A
major strike in 1896 at Leadville Colorado was broken by the state governor and
the use of the militia.

It was after the Leadville defeat
that the WFM moved toward the left. “In 1897, the WFM withdrew from the AFL,
and…President Edward Boyce advocated the miners’ ownership of the mines.”[104]
By 1903, the WFM was reaching the peak of its strength and militancy along with
promoting “socialism and demanded a ‘complete revolution of present social and
economic conditions.’”[105]
During this period, Haywood rose rapidly through the WFM hierarchy.

Haywood was a fierce advocate of
industrial unionism and a hostile critic of the AFL, particularly its leader
Samuel Gompers. According to Haywood, Gompers’ goal in life as highlighted by
his half-hearted defense of the Haymarket anarchists and the Knights of Labor “was
to prevent the growth of the revolutionary working class movement.”[106]
Haywood also singled out the AFL for failing to support the Leadville strike.
Haywood summed up the AFL role in the labor movement as “a record of treason,
treachery, and avarice that must not be forgotten.”[107]
In contrast to this, Haywood advocated “the importance of the revolutionary
labor movement, and now had a deeper understanding of the struggles that had
been made and the sacrifices demanded of the workers in their efforts to emancipate
themselves from wage-slavery.”[108]
Haywood was for a union of all workers to bring down capitalism, which brought
him in opposition to the craft unionism of the AFL.

Haywood’s involvement with the WFM
and its struggles led to an instinctive syndicalism. Haywood was “never satisfied that the
problems of labor could be solved by trade unionism, and parliamentary
socialism was no remedy.”[109]
Haywood had contempt for the law changing things in favor of the workers
“unless we had the economic power-the strength of our union-to enforce them.”[110]
Haywood was also a proponent of the general strike, believing that “all they
[workers] have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got
the capitalist class whipped.”[111]
Haywood’s quest for that economic power would lead to the foundation of an
organization that he hoped could strike a fatal blow against capital: the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

In the early 1900s, “the use of the
militia, the declaration of marital law in numerous areas of Colorado and mass
deportations broke the power of the WFM.”[112]
The continuing repression led the WFM to decide “that the organization could
not stand alone against the concentrated power of the state and big business.”[113]
From this decision came the foundation of the IWW in 1905. The IWW was supposed
to fight for “immediate gains as steps designed to lead to a general strike
(sooner rather than later) by the entire working class that would bring the
entire capitalist economy and government to an absolute halt. With power in the
hands of the working class majority, the economy would be owned, organized and
run by and for the working class.”[114]
Haywood was one of the key speakers at the IWW convention in Chicago, declaring
that “this is the Continental Congress of the Working Class, We are here to
confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement in
possession of the economic powers, the means of life, in control of the
machinery of production without regard to capitalist masters.”[115]
Although the IWW was not founded as an explicitly syndicalist organization,
many of the theories associated with syndicalism were influential in its ranks.
Despite the presence of many Socialist Party members, “there was a strong
feeling among the delegates against political action.”[116]
Although not developed theoretically, the IWW was definitely influenced by
syndicalist ideas circulating in Europe. Following its foundation, the IWW
engaged in organizing many of the workers neglected by the AFL and engaged in
many famous strikes over the next decade such as the famous Lawrence textile
strike in 1912 (more below).[117]

At the IWW’s founding convention
Haywood noted that none of the major leaders of the conservative wing of the
Socialist Party, “Berger, Hilliquit, Spargo or Hayes took part.”[118]
The US Socialist Party (SPUSA) was rapidly growing during the first two decades
of the twentieth century. Haywood himself was a founding member of the SPUSA.
However, it was divided just like the European parties with openly reformist
and revolutionary wings. The rightwing of the Socialist Party was more
interested in pursuing social reform, anti-corruption campaigns and currying
favor with the AFL than revolutionary action. By 1912, the right had enough
control within the party to recall Haywood, only recently elevated to the
Central Committee (more below).[119]
There was a significantly large left wing in the Socialist Party that advocated
class struggle and was involved in the founding of the IWW among them was Party
leader Eugene Debs.[120]
Many of the syndicalist-inclined members of the party advocated direct
industrial action and were against running candidates for political office.
However, these leftist didn’t have control of the Party machine and were often
sectarian in their politics.[121]

However, Haywood was not given the
opportunity to participate in an IWW organizing drive or SP politics. In
December 1905, the former anti-union governor of Idaho was murdered and Haywood
(along with two other WFM leaders) was brought to Idaho to stand trial for conspiracy
to kill the governor. The evidence against Haywood and the others was coerced
from the actual killer in an effort to break the WFM. Haywood was declared an
undesirable citizen by President Teddy Roosevelt and was expected to receive
the death penalty. However, Haywood’s arrest prompted a massive defense
campaign by the labor movement and resulted in his acquittal in 1907 to wide
acclaim.[122]

Upon his release, Haywood again took
up his activities in the IWW and SPUSA. Haywood tried to maintain a balance of
political and economic action. For political action, Haywood attended the 1908
SPUSA convention and was “in favor of Eugene Debs, who was nominated by the
convention as the party’s candidate for President.”[123]
Haywood also spoke approvingly of the SP 1908 political program where “the
class struggle was its foundation.”[124]
At the same time, Haywood said that the IWW actions did show the significance
of political action. The IWW had fought “one battle after another for free
speech. They have fought against vagrancy laws, against criminal syndicalism
laws and to establish the right of workers to organize.”[125]
For instance, Haywood believed that industrial organization should be the
backbone of political organization, saying “that the broadest interpretation of
political power comes through the industrial organization; that the industrial
organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the
capitalists from disenfranchising the worker.”[126]
It would be safe to say that Haywood’s primary focus was on economic action as
opposed to politics. However, he was willing to support political action so
long as it had a revolutionary edge.

Haywood continued as chief organizer
for the IWW after the WFM bolted from the IWW over continued factional
fighting.[127]
Haywood participated in some of the most famous IWW strikes, including the 1912
strike in Lawrence Massachusetts and the following year in Patterson New
Jersey. The Lawrence strike involved a largely immigrant work force who
protested wretched working conditions and brought national attention on the
conditions of the workers.[128]

It was around this same time that
Haywood developed a decidedly negative impression of the Socialist Party during
their convention. The 1912 convention was coming on the heels of the successful
Lawrence strike of the IWW. Haywood’s view of the delegates was that they “were
of an altogether different caliber than those who went to make up the
convention of 1908. The class struggle meant nothing to many who were there
supposedly representing the workers.”[129]
It was at the convention that Haywood found himself in confrontation with the
party machine as represented by Berger and Hilliquit. The party passed a motion
that “a member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime,
sabotage or other weapons of violence…shall be expelled from membership in the
party.”[130]
Haywood believed that the party statute was similar to criminal syndicalism
laws that banned the IWW. For upholding this statute, Haywood believed the
party “began to retrograde from the date of the Indianapolis convention.”[131]
Haywood was removed from the Central Committee in response and turned his focus
to the IWW.

Only a few years later, both the
SPUSA and IWW, despite their differences, would find themselves battered down
by the same foe. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, the
Socialist Party opposed entry into the war. The Socialist Party was hit hard by
the repression visited upon them by the federal government. The IWW position
toward the war was that “we openly declared ourselves the determined opponents
of all nationalistic sectionalism, or patriotism, and the militarism preached
and supported by our one enemy, the capitalist class.”[132]
The Federal government effectively made the IWW impotent with the outbreak of
war. Its members were imprisoned or killed, funds seized, and speech stifled.
The ending of the war in 1918 did little to stop the onslaught against the
IWW. The Red Scare and Palmer Raids made
sure that the IWW did not recover in the postwar period. There was also a major
wave of strikes in 1919 such as the Chicago steel strike and a General Strike
in Seattle, to name only two. However, all these strikes ultimately went down
in defeat.[133] The US
left in general was effectively crushed for a decade.[134]
Although the SP and IWW were effectively routed, the Communist Party was
founded in 1919. Many of those active in the IWW and SP left would find their
way to the new party, including William Haywood.[135]

Haywood’s move toward the Communist
Party did not take place out of the blue. Once the US became involved in the
war, Haywood supported the IWW anti-war position. Haywood was blunt on his
views, “all class conscious members of the industrial workers of the world are
conscientiously opposed to spilling the blood of human beings…because we
believe that the interests and welfare of the working class of all countries
are identical.”[136]
Despite this position, Haywood was “convinced that the IWW could not stop the
war, he was determined that it adopt a low profile on the issue simply for its
own self-preservation.”[137]
Haywood had the IWW change focus “from the urban factory workers of the East to
the vast armies of itinerant laborers in the West.”[138]
By 1917, this strategy proved successful to the IWW, which “continued to press
its organizational efforts across the West...as organizers enrolled enough
recruits to double the previous year’s membership of forty thousand.”[139]
Haywood and the IWW paid for their anti-war stand and union charges with the
onset of wartime sedition laws and mob violence. Haywood pressed on and was
brought to court on sedition charges in 1918. Rather than accept a long prison
sentence, Haywood fled to Soviet Russia as a devoted Communist in 1920. He also
had to watch as the prewar radical movement was crushed by the state. In this
atmosphere, Haywood looked for new answers.

Although
Haywood had favored the 1917 Russian Revolution, he was too caught up with
government repression to think through the implications of Bolshevik doctrine.[140]
It was in 1920 that Haywood read a document published by the Comintern
(Communist International) that convinced him of the rightness of the Bolshevik
course. The document in question was an open letter to the IWW explaining the
doctrines of communism and contrasting them to the IWW. Upon reading this,
Haywood declared “here is what we have been dreaming about; here is the IWW all
feathered out!”[141]
What exactly was it about this document that convinced Haywood to become a
Communist? Even Haywood’s biographer, Peter Carlson says that the document just
said that “the Bolsheviks intended to ‘put the workers in control and
eventually eliminate the state.’”[142]
Yet if that was all it said, we should conclude that Haywood’s embrace of
Bolshevism was rather shallow. However, the Comintern letter gives a simple and
extended defense of Bolshevism. In analyzing this letter, we can see what might
have attracted Haywood to Bolshevism.

The letter boldly proclaimed that
“history does not ask whether we like it or not, whether the workers are ready
or not. Here is the opportunity. Take it – and the world will belong to the
workers; leave it – there may not be another for generations.”[143]
The article was saying that the revolution was now and those interested had to
take up the banner. The letter said that the IWW should follow the Bolsheviks
because the “Revolution has taken the factories, mills, mines, land and
financial institutions out of the hands of the capitalists and transferred them
to the WHOLE WORKING CLASS.”[144]
Furthermore, the Bolsheviks condemned parliamentary socialists who “have
discredited the very name of Socialism.”[145]
The letter proclaimed that the only way for the workers to accomplish the
revolution was to “overthrow the capitalist Governments and set up a Government
of the working class, which shall destroy the institution of capitalist private
property and make all wealth the property of all the workers in common.”[146]
The letter declared that the IWW should understand the oppressive nature of the
state and organize to overthrow it and “in place of the capitalist State the
workers must build their own WORKERS’ STATE, the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.”[147] The
workers’ state was necessary to put down the resistance of the capitalists. The
form of the workers’ state was the soviet where “nobody who employs labor for
profit can vote.”[148]
The soviet system was centralized, unlike the IWW which saw centralization as
anti-democratic. However, the letter said that centralization was necessary “To
overthrow capitalism the workers must be a military force, with its General
Staff – but this General Staff elected and controlled by the workers.”[149]
In regards to political action, the Communists say they agree with the IWW
critique of reformist socialists. The letter says “So far the Communists and
the I.W.W. are in accord. The capitalist State must be attacked by DIRECT
ACTION.” While the Communists agree with the use of a general strike, “but they
add that it must turn into ARMED INSURRECTION. Both the General Strike and the
insurrection are forms of POLITICAL ACTION.”[150]
In regards to participation in the current system, the letter says, “Communists
elected to Congress or the legislatures have as their function to make
propaganda; to ceaselessly expose the real nature of the capitalist State, to
obstruct the operations of capitalist government and show their class
character, to explain the futility of all capitalist reform measures, etc.”[151]
This open letter provided a clear exposition of Bolshevik thinking which
Haywood quickly adhered to.

V. James P. Cannon

A man who followed a similar
trajectory to Haywood was James P. Cannon. Cannon was born in 1890 in Kansas to
an Irish family. Cannon came from a working class Irish Republican family.
Cannon’s father was also active in the socialist movement and was “one of those
many stalwarts who used their spare time for ‘talking socialism’ and their
spare change to subsidize the movement.”[152]
James Cannon was also influenced by his mother’s devout Catholicism and
considered himself “a ‘Christian socialist’ up to the age of twenty-one.”[153]
However, Cannon’s steady immersion into socialist literature and philosophical
questions eventually caused Cannon to become an atheist. Cannon was caught up
in the labor defense campaigns and the socialist press, joining the party in
1908.

However, Cannon saw the party as
rife with contradiction, there was a middle class reformist element in control
and “the revolutionary workers in the ranks were repelled by this middle-class
invasion, as well as the policy that induced it.”[154]
Cannon joined the IWW in 1911, considering the organization to have answers he
was looking for. Cannon summed up the ideas of the IWW succinctly as “get the
workers into one big union and put an end to this whole capitalist claptrap.
Make a society run by the workers and fit to live in.”[155]
Cannon became “a traveling organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World
and a follower of Vincent St. John.”[156]
Cannon participated in strikes in Akron Ohio and Duluth Minnesota, and
soapboxed around the country.

However, Cannon’s active time in the
IWW came to an end when he married in 1913. He went back to his hometown and
began to raise a family, but still remained a dedicated socialist and largely
inactive Wobbly. However, his ideas began to change as World War One broke out
and the USA moved closer to entry. Cannon believed that the IWW’s attitude
toward the war was to “ignore it.”[157]
Cannon was also eager to organize factory workers, but the IWW wanted to focus
more on agricultural workers.[158]
Cannon found himself growing more critical of the IWW, believing that the
organization led many strikes but “whether won or lost, stable union
organization was not maintained.”[159]
Cannon was also critical of the IWW’s response to the political oppression of
the war years. To Cannon, “the ‘political state’ which the industrial union
movement had done its best to ignore, ‘was revealed as the centralized power of
the ruling class…The political action of the capitalist state broke the back of
the IWW as a union.’”[160]
Despite recognizing the strengths of the IWW, Cannon saw the organization as
deficient in many ways.

However, the Bolshevik revolution
changed Cannon’s perspective immensely. To Cannon, the IWW’s disavowal of
political action had let it be crushed by the US government. However, political
action “was demonstrated positively by the Russian Revolution. The Russian
workers took the state power into their own hands and used that power to
expropriate the capitalists and suppress all attempts at counterrevolution.”[161]
Cannon’s positive view of the political action of the Bolsheviks meant in the
US, “direct political action that lived in its concrete accomplishments as well
as in its wide-reaching implications for the theory of the revolutionary
movement.”[162]
Cannon’s views led him to see the need for a political party of the working
class modeled on the Bolsheviks. In 1919, Cannon along with others in the IWW
and Socialist Left organized the Communist Party. Years later, Cannon summed up
the transition on the US Left from the IWW to the Communist Party. These words
could very well describe his transformation in thinking. “They [IWW] had not
adjusted their ideology to the lessons of war and the Russian revolution. They
had not acquired a sufficient respect for doctrine, for theory.”[163]
Cannon was to maintain this position for the rest of his life.

VI. Antonio Gramsci

A fourth person, Antonio Gramsci,
offers an example of a leftist within the Socialist Party who came to
Bolshevism without passing through a syndicalist organization. Before touching
on Gramsci’s evolution, it would be useful to layout the state of Italy and its
radical movement. Italy had a powerful socialist and syndicalist movement on
the eve of World War I. Italy entered the twentieth century at breakneck speed.
Since unification in 1870, industrial capitalism with massive factories had
been developing quickly in Italy, centered on the Northern cities of Turin,
Milan and Genoa. For instance, “the industrial work-force was also highly
concentrated: over 58% of workers in companies employing ten or more people
were in the North-West (the so-called ‘industrial triangle’ formed by Milan,
Genoa and Turin). The same area contained nearly 50% of the total mechanized
power in Italy (measured in hp), but hardly more than 20% of the total
population.”[164]
Despite this great expansion of capitalism in the north in 1900, “nearly 40% of
Italy’s active population were still engaged in agriculture, which provided
almost 50% Of Gross National Product; by 1913 agriculture’s share of GNP had
only fallen to 45%, in contrast to 27% from industry and 30% from services.”[165]
Modern industry mushroomed in Turin and the city was dominated by Fiat and
Olivetti.

Industrial
expansion led in “the ten years before the war, Italian industrial production,
in large measure based on the most recent technology, increased by 87 percent
against a European average of 56 percent.”[166]
The expansion of industry brought with it not only a modern working class, but
a bourgeoisie. However, Italian development was uneven and the south remained a
largely agricultural backwater mired in stagnation.[167]
This uneven industrial growth was supported by the government at every turn.
“At every stage, that capitalism was powered by the state and the unusually
fecund banking and financial system, which tended to absorb the agrarians and
provide a focus of class solidarity, transcending sectional conflicts of
interest.”[168] While
the Italian state was encouraging capitalist growth, it dealt with the
socialist and labor movements through a combination of repression and
accommodation.

During the 1890s and early, Prime
Minister Giolitti “advocated the state’s neutrality in disputes between capital
and labor, and greater state intervention to provide minimum welfare support
for the working classes.”[169]
Furthermore, the electoral franchise in Italy increased from barely 2% of the
population in 1870 to universal male suffrage by 1914. However, welfare plans
and expansion of the franchise did not change the fact that the Italian
proletariat’s move to improve its standard of living was met by state violence.
The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) formed in 1892 had its leaders arrested
barely two years later. Re-legalized the following year, the party “played a
leading part in the struggle against repression, was suppressed in the mass
insurrections of 1898.”[170]
In the industrial city of Turin from 1900, the workers “began to develop a
fierce militancy.”[171]
Turin would experience general strikes in 1902, 1904, 1907, 1909, 1912-3, and
1915.[172] It was
in this atmosphere of coercion and consent that the PSI would grow.

The Italian Socialist Party was
formed in 1892 from a fusion of various socialist groups from across Italy. The
party was founded on the model of the German SPD with “its emphasis on the need
for organized political action through and under the leadership of the Party.”[173]
The PSI’s dominant tendency “saw the struggle for socialism in evolutionary
rather than revolutionary terms, and they believed that the class struggle
should be fought through the institutions of the bourgeoisie state.”[174]
Despite the reformist tendency in the PSI, there was no outright conflict with
them. State repression, as mentioned earlier fell on the PSI and increased
cohesion within its ranks and spread its message. From 1892 to 1900, the PSI
increased its representation in parliament from 6 representatives to 32.[175]
In 1901, labor militancy brought the reformist leadership under attack. Party
leader Turati advocated the party’s minimum program and advocated “a temporary
alliance with the more progressive liberals and with the democrats and
radicals…”[176] In
1903, with strikes spreading “the syndicalist and revolutionary socialists
successfully challenged Turati and gained control over the Party and its
newspaper L’Avanti.”[177]
There would be a constant jockeying by reformists and revolutionaries for
control of the PSI until 1920.

Although, the PSI was “steeped in
reformist practice, thinking-and perhaps more important, reformist instincts.”[178]
The Italian state under Giolitti made repeated attempts to integrate the PSI
with its welfare plans. The party leadership took advantage of municipal power
after “Giolitti introduced legislation which permitted the municipalization of
local services and opened the way for a rapid expansion in the range of services
run by the council.”[179]
In order for the PSI to hold onto municipal power, this “necessarily involved
alliances with other political groups and labor organizations that made it
anathema to the opponents of reformism within the Party.”[180]
This local reformist practice extended all the way up to the parliament itself.
Despite revolutionary rhetoric from the PSI at intervals from 1903 on, the
Directorate’s leadership repeated reaction [to reformism] was a reaffirmation
of the maximum and revolutionary programme of the party to curb the reformists,
a shuffle leftwards to embrace the mutinous in a revolutionary recuperation
which did not in fact seriously affect the parliamentary, trade-union and
reformist reality of party practice…an indication of its structural character.[181]

Indeed
it would be safe to say that the party was very much like the SPD or others in
the Second International, expecting socialism in an almost fatalistic fashion.
Even a left party leader, Giacinto Serrati said “we, as Marxists, interpret history;
we do not make it.”[182]
What was missing here was an affirmation of revolutionary praxis needed to
bring about socialism.

Despite the deficiencies of the PSI,
these were seemingly submerged from 1911 onward. After Italy invaded Libya in
1911, there was a revolt within the PSI. Reformists in the PSI backed the
conquest, leading to a near fracturing of the party. Party maximalists (or
revolutionaries) from 1911-2 managed to regain control of the central
directorate of the PSI and gained control.[183]
Indeed, when Italy entered World War I in 1915, the PSI would refuse to back
the government in its venture.[184]
Furthermore, when Party Leader Mussolini called for support for intervention he
was promptly expelled.[185]

Although Italy had a large and
powerful syndicalist movement with centers among the farmers of the Po Valley,
and influence in major influence on railroads and maritime unions and a union
federation (USI) of 100,000 in 1912.[186]
However, many leading syndicalists (although many rank-and-file syndicalists opposed
the war) in contrast to many of their comrades in Europe and the USA supported
the war.[187] Italy
offers an example of where the revolutionary character of the PSI was still up
for grabs and seemed to be settled in 1915 when the Party remained true to its
principles.

It was in this environment that
Antonio Gramsci entered the Socialist movement. Gramsci was born in 1891 on the
island of Sardina. His early life was marked by grinding poverty and a visible
hunchback from a childhood accident. Gramsci lived his early life in Sardina,
an Italian island that was little removed from feudalism and suffering heavily
after unification.[188]
Gramsci developed an early passion for reading and the effects of poverty led
to him “to wish that life would change, that somehow…his family rich and
respected…”[189]
Gramsci was a brilliant student, who despite missing several years of school
was recognized as possessing a keen mind. The interrupted schooling led Gramsci
to develop “an instinct of rebellion against the rich.”[190]
They were going to school while he was forced to work for his family, it didn’t
seem fair.

By 1908 Gramsci’s academic talents
eventually led him to school in Cagliari where his Sardinian identity led to
“dislike of all ‘continentals’, on whom with some justice all Sardina’s
inequities could be blamed.”[191]
The injustices in Sardina led Gramsci to write in a school essay that “social
privileges and differences, being products of society and not of nature, can be
overcome.”[192]
However, Gramsci was still thinking through how to overcome social inequality.
In 1911, Gramsci was accepted on a scholarship to the University of Turin on
the Italian mainland.

As discussed above, Turin was the
center of the Italian labor movement. While as University, Gramsci was
confronted with a modern industrial world that contrasted greatly with peasant
Sardina. During his early period in Turin, Gramsci focused more on his studies
than politics. However, Gramsci was interested in the intellectual currents of
the left. Yet Gramsci did not approve of PSI policy that threw in its support
to the Giolitti and called the south (including Sardina), “the Vendee of
Italy.”[193]
Gramsci read various journals of the intelligentsia and was influenced greatly
by his teachers. Gramsci’s professors
introduced him to thinkers such as Hegel and Croce, idealist philosophers.
Gramsci’s professors “preached idealism and a cult of personal ethical
responsibility…with an adhesion to socialism and a rejection of the semi-racism
which had characterized the Italian socialist party since 1900.”[194]
Gramsci was also associating with a crowd of socialists that included future
Communist Party leaders Palmiro Togliatti and Angelo Tasca.

During the 1913 elections (the first
with universal male suffrage), Gramsci watched as “the property-owners of
Sardina rapidly made common cause with the ruling class on the mainland and
subordinated their erstwhile Sard nationalism to their class interests because
they feared a threat to property by the socialists…were all continentials
responsible for Sardina’s ills, or merely the property-owning class and their
class-allies on the island?”[195]
Shortly thereafter, Gramsci entered the socialist party.

Gramsci was not initially active in
the PSI. He was still trying to make an academic career, preferably as a
linguist. However, Gramsci devoted himself to activism as Italy moved into
World War One. During this period, Gramsci was influenced by Mussolini, leader
of the revolutionary faction of the PSI after 1911. When Mussolini called for
Italian intervention in the war, Gramsci offered support in one of his earliest
articles. Gramsci believed that neutral position of the PSI should advocate
“active and operative neutrality.”[196]
This active neutrality would allow the party to put “the class struggle back at
the center of the nation’s life.”[197]
Active neutrality and the class struggle would allow the PSI to lead the
workers against the bourgeois “which will signal the transition of civilization
from an imperfect to alternative, more perfect form.”[198]
However, as Mussolini moved farther away from the PSI to an open break, Gramsci
remained in the party. It also wasn’t long before Gramsci himself became an
antiwar militant.

Yet his article in support of
Mussolini shows some traits of Gramsci’s conception and praxis that would
figure prominently in his later thinking. Gramsci’s emphasis on class struggle
and an active neutrality shows his
nearly voluntarist streak. Gramsci wants the socialist party to make a
revolution, not just wait for one to happen. This thinking carries over to 1916
where Gramsci says, “to know oneself means to be oneself, to free oneself from
a state of chaos, to exist as an element of order-but of one’s own order and
one’s own discipline in striving for an ideal.”[199]
For Gramsci this ideal was socialism and he earnestly worked for it while in
Turin as a journalist. Yet Gramsci was not just an ordinary writer, he immersed
himself in the Turin labor movement. Gramsci “rapidly earned the reputation for
being an intellectual to whom the workers could speak without fear…he used to
speak and he had a great gift of knowing how to speak to everyone.”[200]
Gramsci wasn’t just interested in the conditions of the proletariat, but to
raise their consciousness and culture. For Gramsci, culture “is organization,
discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality;
it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds
in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s
own rights and obligations.”[201]
Clearly for Gramsci, a maturing Marxist, he wanted the working class to
understand the world so that they could change it.

A spur to Gramsci’s ideas was the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and the developing condition of Italy under the
strains of war. Gramsci hailed the Russian Revolution in a provocative article
called, “The Revolution Against Kapital.” To Gramsci, the Bolshevik “conquest
bears witness that the canons of historical materialism are not so rigid as
might have been and has been thought.”[202]
The Bolsheviks “live Marxist thought…this thought sees as the dominant factor
in history, not raw economic facts, but men…men coming to understand economic
facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the
driving force of the economy and molds objective reality…”[203]
Thus in direct contrast to Turati who said that Marxists can’t make history,
Gramsci believes they can and should.

Yet aside from the Bolshevik praxis
of breaking with a rigid interpretation of Marx and taking power, what else did
Gramsci learn from their seizure of power? Gramsci was attracted to the Soviet
form as a democratic basis of a new socialist order. The Soviet was seen as an
“organ in a continuous state of development…All workers can take part in the
Soviets, and all workers can exert their influence in modifying the Soviets and
bringing them closer into line with what is wanted and needed.”[204]
Gramsci summed the soviet form as “the vital élan of the new Russian history.”[205]
For Gramsci, a revolutionary praxis and the soviet were key components of the
Russian experience.

However, they were not just isolated
to Russia. As the war was coming to an end, Italy was fast approaching a
revolutionary explosion. In Italy, “the cost of living climbed from 100 to 624
between 1913 and 1920.”[206]
Wages stagnated in comparison “the index for daily earnings rose from 3.54 lire
to 6.04 lire over the same period [1915 to 1918].”[207]
Yet the capitalist class made out like bandits from the war. Just to take the
example of automobiles, the prominent industry in Turin, the profit rates from
1914 to 1917 “were said to have risen from 8.2 to 30.5 percent.”[208]
To top it all off, Italy gained little new territory from the war at the cost
of a half million dead and an equal number maimed.

Furthermore, tens of thousands of
workers and peasants flocked to the left. From 1919 to 1920, Italy was awash in
“social confrontation-massive strike waves in industry and agriculture, direct
action in the factories, local food and price actions, land occupations, and
constant displays of collective strength in rallies, marches, and processions.”[209]
To take just the example of direct action in the factories, this shows how the
thinking of soviets functioned in Gramsci’s thinking. In Turin, internal
committees were prominent in automobile factories. Internal committees had
first been formed in 1906 at a Fiat plant and was “roughly comparable to the
shop steward in the United States-was not regarded as a permanent institution
by the industrialists; the idea was to choose a new committee for each
dispute.”[210]
However, Gramsci wanted to make the internal committees not merely permanent
but to transform them into soviets.

Many of the committees in Turin in
1919 “were chosen from those acceptable to management, but later they were
often selected from members of the socialist party. Thus internal committees
were not democratically elected bodies that actually represented the views of
all the workers.”[211]
Gramsci believed that “the workshop commissions are organs of worker democracy
which must be freed from the constraints imposed on them by the bosses and
infused with a new life and energy.” Once the commissions were freed from
capitalist control, then they would “be the organs of proletariat power,
replacing the capitalist in all his useful managerial and administrative
functions.”[212] So
Gramsci was advocating worker control and democracy at the very point of
production.

Gramsci continued with his
educational activities, working closely with worker activists throughout Turin.
In the heated atmosphere of postwar Italy, it didn’t take long for the idea of
soviets to catch on and spread throughout much of the north. Internal
Committees or rechristened Factory Councils spread across Turin and other
cities in 1919 and 1920. However, factory councils and strong unions threatened
capitalist power in a fundamental way. Things came to a head in Turin in 1920
in April when a general strike spread across the province of Piedmont. The
strike involved, “half a million industrial and agricultural workers and
affected a population of about four million.”[213]
The strike was ultimately defeated, but labor flared up a few months later in
August. This time, workers in Turin occupied their factories and “the actual
management of the plants lay in the hands of the factory councils.”[214]
A situation of dual power was developing with some workers “enrolled in Red
Guards organized at first to protect the plants against assault, later used to
maintain discipline among those workers whose enthusiasm began to wane.”[215]
By mid-September, the industrialists signed an agreement with the workers that
brought a major pay raises, overtime pay, holiday pay, and no lay-offs.
Furthermore, even workers control was accepted on principle. Workers returned
factories to their owners, but “within a year most of these gains were
obliterated.”[216]
Workers control became an “investigation to determine whether the conditions of
industry really required the reduction of wages that the industrialists
declared to be necessary.”[217]
In other words, the capitalists were still calling the shots.

The response of Gramsci to the Turin
strike in April was that:

revolutionary energies in our city have been intensifying
over the past few months., tending at all costs to expand and seek an outlet.
And this outlet must not for the moment be localized bloodletting that would be
dangerous and perhaps even fatal, but rather a stepping up of the campaign of
preparation all over the country, an extension of our forces and a general
acceleration of the process of development of the elements which must all come
together in a common enterprise.[218]

In
other words, make the Italian revolution. The instrument that should’ve
spearheaded this revolution was the PSI. However, the PSI did nothing to extend
the revolution in Italy. In April, the PSI congress in Milan approved a “motion
sanctioning a project for the construction of councils was again approved by a
large majority; but while the party leaders chattered about theoretical
projects at Milan, they were permitting the real thing to be destroyed at
Turin.”[219] In
September, the PSI actually put up the question of revolution on its agenda,
the results “the question of converting the factory occupations into a national
revolutionary challenge was referred by the PSI leadership to the CGL[union]
National Council, which rejected the idea by only 591,245 to 409, 569 votes.”[220]
What’s more, the PSI had by 1919 decided to adhere to the Comintern and was
proclaiming revolutionary action. Yet at the moment of decision, the PSI
faltered. The PSI Maximalists “fed expectations without resolving them. They
fanned a mood of revolutionary excitement but refused to shape it into a
revolutionary challenge…But when the masses took them at their word and acted,
they counseled discipline and patience.”[221]
The PSI said in words that they were adhering to the Comintern and a new
revolutionary path, but in deeds they failed.

Gramsci’s opinion of the PSI soured
accordingly. He said that the “Socialist Party watches the course of events
like a spectator, it never has an opinion of its own to express, based on the
revolutionary theses of Marxism and the Communist International; it never
launches slogans that can be interpreted by the masses, lay down a general line
and unify or concentrate revolutionary action.”[222]
The PSI was not living up to its professed program as a communist vanguard.
Furthermore, the PSI “needs to be in a position to be in a position to give
real leadership to the movement as a whole and to impress upon the masses the
conviction that there is an order within the terrible disorder of the present,
an order that, when systemized, will regenerate society and adapt the
instruments of labor to make them satisfy the basic needs of life and civil
progress.”[223]
Finally, the PSI must reformists “must be eliminated from the Party, and its
leadership must devote all its efforts to putting the workers’ forces on a war
footing…and organize the setting up of Factory Councils to exercise control
over industrial and agricultural production.”[224]
The Party needed to purge the reformists, assume a Bolshevik form and press for
the formation of Soviets and/or Factory Councils.

However, the PSI split over the
questions that Gramsci was raising a year later, leading to the formation of
the Italian Communist Party. For Gramsci, one of key aspects of the Bolshevik
experience was a decidedly revolutionary praxis as opposed to fatalism.
Revolutionary praxis by the proletariat meant democratic control by the
Soviets. However in order to spread the Soviets across Italy, a disciplined
Communist Party was necessary to agitate and organize them.

VII. Bolshevik Theory
and Practice

In 1914, the two major trends of the
left (syndicalism and the socialist parties) had proven to be utterly incapable
of opposing the war by revolutionary means. In 1914, the Second International,
“when hostilities commenced in 1914, one after another the socialist parties of
the European nations came to the support of their national governments.
Socialist internationalism proved to be hollow indeed.”[225]
For the next four years, the socialist parties became active supporters of
their respective national governments in the general slaughter of World War
One. Those parties that tried to remain true to their principles were
ineffective or crushed. The syndicalists were either crushed or joined in the
patriotic fervor for war. The prewar syndicalist movement was thus a spent
force even in neutral countries such as Spain.

Before coming to conclusions about
Serge, Haywood, Cannon and Gramsci it is necessary to lay out a brief view of
the Bolshevik movement itself and those features that would be most attractive
for would-be revolutionaries. This analysis of Bolshevism will be done largely
through the writings of Vladimir Lenin, the principle leader and theorist of the
party. Bolshevism as presented here is not the caricature drawn by Cold
Warriors and Stalinists. Rather the portrait of Bolshevism that emerges is of a
dynamic and profoundly democratic movement dedicated to revolution.[226]

Russia, unlike Western Europe, was
still marred deeply by absolutist and feudal structures. Russia was ruled by an
absolutist dynasty of Tsars known as the Romanovs supported by a powerful
nobility. The peasantry was mired in abject poverty and hungry for land. The
forces of capitalism were as yet underdeveloped in Russia. However, at the dawn
of the twentieth century, the bourgeoisie were developing industry with modern
technology from the West. A proletariat was developing in Russia’s highly
concentrated industry which lived in abject poverty and was exceedingly
militant.[227]

It was in this environment that
Lenin was born in 1870 to a mildly prosperous family in Imperial Russia.
Following the execution of his elder brother in 1887 who had been implicated in
a plot to assassinate the Tsar, Lenin turned toward revolution and Marxism.
Within a few years, Lenin became a Marxist and rose to a commanding position
through his theoretical and organizational gifts.[228]

Lenin became a prominent leader in
the emerging Social Democratic Party. Following a dispute over Party rules and
membership, Lenin led a group (known as the Bolsheviks) and set up his own
organization. It was Lenin’s organization that would ultimately prove to be the
guiding light of Russia’s Revolution of October 1917.

Lenin’s Bolsheviks were not like the
syndicalists, separate from the Second International. Rather, the Bolsheviks
were among the most enthusiastic champions of the International. When the
Bolshevik Party was founded in 1903, Lenin was an orthodox Marxist who looked
to the German SPD as his model. As will become clear shortly, despite Lenin’s
attempt to mimic the SPD in Russia, what he ended up creating was something far
different.[229]

Holding the traditional stagiest
theory of Marxism that Russia was not ready for socialism, but on the verge of
capitalism, Lenin wrote the Development
of Capitalism in Russia in 1895. In this work, Lenin sought to show that
market relations were taking hold in the countryside. He believed that this
entailed the creation of a market that was spawning an impoverished
proletariat. Lenin believed that the creation of the new proletariat in Russia
would be capable of leading Russia’s democratic (not socialist) revolution
against the Tsarist regime.[230]

Traditionally, Marxists had (such as
George Plekhanov) d believed in a stagiest theory that Russia was ripe only for
an anti-Tsarist revolution that would lead to the development of capitalism.
This revolution was to be led by the bourgeois. Lenin on the contrary believed
that the revolution in Russia (still bourgeois) would be led by the
proletariat.[231]

To lead this anti-Tsarist
revolution, Lenin believed that what was needed was a party modeled on the SPD.
Lars Lih believes that Lenin viewed the SPD through idealized lenses and that
“the Party’s job was to teach the workers not only how to carry out their
mission [the revolution] but, more fundamentally, that they had a mission.”[232]
Thus Lenin’s party was not going to wait patiently for the revolution like the
more fatalistic reformists in the West. Rather, Lenin urged Social Democrats to
fight for “the struggle for reforms. But it [Social Democracy] uses economic
agitation to present to the government not only the demand for this or that
measure but also (and first of all) the demand to cease being an autocratic
government.”[233]
Thus Lenin’s ideal of the party was not to struggle for mere reforms, but to be
a revolutionary instrument pushing for the overthrow of the Tsarist regime.

Despite the common misconception
that Lenin didn’t believe that workers could reach socialist consciousness,
Lenin’s work What is to Be Done?
written in 1902 praises the workers for their bold actions. Lenin believed that
revolutionaries by trade were needed to expand the party and the revolutionary
movement. Lenin’s ideal for a Social Democrat was quite different than what was
found in the West. Rather, a

Social-Democrat's
ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to
react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it
appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able
to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police
violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every
event, however small, in order to set forth
before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in
order to clarify for all
and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the
emancipation of the proletariat.[234]

What emerges from Lenin’s view of
the party is that the organization consists of dedicated Marxists, who organize
against all the injustices of society for revolution. The party was supposed to
bring the good news of socialism to the workers to inspire them for the mission
of socialism.[235]

The Bolsheviks were active during
the failed 1905 Revolution and the brief upsurge of 1912-4.[236]
However, the Bolsheviks remained a part of the Second International until the
outbreak of war. Unlike the majority of socialist parties, the Bolsheviks did not
rush to the national colors. Lenin broke with the pro-war socialists and
believed that the war was caused by imperialism, a concept he developed
theoretically after long study. Lenin believed that the war had revealed the
bankruptcy of capitalism and that the time was ripe for revolution.[237]
In his own words, “it would be a shame to call oneself a Social-Democrat and
not to advise the workers to break with the opportunists and exert all their
efforts to strengthen, deepen, extend and sharpen the incipient revolutionary
movement and demonstrations.”[238]
Lenin, in short, wanted to turn the world war into a world revolution.

Lenin was active in the Zimmerald
Movement that sought an end to World War One. Lenin also believed that it was
necessary to split the Second International, creating a new revolutionary
International. It was under the pressure of the war that Lenin developed his
theory of imperialism that would provide the foundation for his changeover to
pushing for a socialist revolution in Russia in 1917.[239]

In 1917, the Tsarist regime
collapsed from exhaustion due to the strains of the war. In its place was an
inept Provisional government composed of nobles and capitalists on one side and
Soviets (Council) made up of workers and soldiers on the other side. The
population was eager for change with the workers demanding rights and greater
control on the job. Peasants were demanding land and antiwar agitation was
spreading in the armed forces.

The other leftist parties rallied to
the provisional government, believing that Russia was not ripe for socialism.
However, Lenin and the Bolsheviks pushed for “a republic of Soviets of
Workers', Agricultural Labourers' and Peasants' Deputies throughout the
country, from top to bottom”[240]
which would lead the way to worldwide revolution. The Bolsheviks were able to
act on the discontent of the masses and build support in the soviets and
popular organizations with their uncompromising stance. The Bolshevik desire to
push for the socialist revolution attracted many anarchists to their ranks
especially during the July Days and even afterward.[241]
In November 1917, the Bolsheviks were able to seize power based on the Soviets
and to begin a socialist reconstruction of Russia.[242]

It would be useful at this juncture
to stop and look at Lenin’s theories in 1917. Rather than supporting the model
of a bourgeoisie republic, Lenin advocated a state based on the Paris Commune.
To Lenin, the Paris “Commune[243],
therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine "only"
by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be
elected and subject to recall.”[244]
This analysis was supported by Marx, and Lenin believed that the Soviet was a
form of organization like that of the Commune type that could serve as the
basis for socialist power.[245]

In the State and Revolution, Lenin also summed up the differences between
Marxists and anarchists. He criticized the anarchists for believing that the
state could be abolished overnight; anarchists had a vague idea of what would
replace capitalism while Marxists advocated Communes; anarchists didn’t want to
utilize the present state for revolutionary ends.[246]
Lenin says, “the tactics of the anarchist become the tactics of despair instead
of a ruthlessly bold revolutionary effort to solve concrete problems while
taking into account the practical conditions of the mass movement.”[247]
In other words, Lenin believed that because of the deficiencies in anarchist
praxis and the lack of an organization such as he elaborated in What is to be Done, the anarchists were
unable to be effective revolutionaries. Lenin’s theory and practice, as
evidenced by the Bolshevik Party was able to lead a revolution that established
Soviet democracy (albeit brief).[248]

VIII.
Conclusion

To many
of those influenced by syndicalism and the socialist parties, Lenin’s bold
theories and actions provided a bold new way to succeed at revolution after
their failures during the war. Serge, Haywood, Cannon and Gramsci came from
different countries and backgrounds. Victor Serge was a journalist. Bill
Haywood and James Cannon were working class organizers. Gramsci was a socialist
activist, journalist and proletariat organizer. They were separated by
different countries and cultures. Yet each passed through anarchism/syndicalism
or socialism and came to embrace Bolshevism. It is now that we return to the
idea of elective affinity. In the case of syndicalism and Bolshevism, both had
much in common; they were profoundly revolutionary and didn’t fit the mold of
the Second International. Both doctrines were profoundly internationalist and
sought a way to bring about the overthrow of capitalism.

However, it was the failure of the
syndicalists to live up to their revolutionary beliefs during World War One
that caused Serge and Haywood’s shift toward Bolshevism. In contrast, the
Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in Russia and establishing a
revolutionary socialist regime. Those syndicalists who remained revolutionary
had to take stock of what it was that allowed Bolshevism to be successful.

All saw in the Bolshevik Party the
effective instrument to carry out the revolution. In a sense,
the syndicalists were focused on the economic sphere and tended to ignore the
state. As Sidney Hook points out, “it was clear that the state could not be
snubbed out of existence because the syndicalist theory and program refused to
recognize the necessity of fighting it on the political front.”[249]
In reaction to the integration of the Second International into their
respective parliaments, the syndicalists decided to focus on the economic
sphere. This left them ill-equipped to deal with the outbreak of World War One.

For socialists and the Bolsheviks,
there was indeed much in common. Both were members of the Second International.
Both adhered to Marxism as a theory and practice. Both were committed to the
establishment of socialism. Yet the Socialist Parties commitment was more
rhetorical than real, as became apparent in 1914. However, the Second
International remained stuck in the institutions of the capitalist state, while
the Bolsheviks embraced the Soviet as a way to transcend the old order. In
Italy, the PSI’s anti-war stance and revolutionary programme was not
well-thought out. When the proletariat upsurge came, they lagged behind. For
Gramsci, the PSI had failed to follow the Russian Road in their actions. The
Bolsheviks spoke what they believed and believed what they spoke.

In contrast to both syndicalism and
socialism, the Bolsheviks built a revolutionary political party that fought on
the economic and political fronts. The Bolsheviks in seeking to imitate the SPD
had built a revolutionary organization that was able to take state power while
remaining true to their socialist principles (unlike the Second International).
The syndicalist reliance on trade unions failed to cope with state repression
and bring on a successful revolution.

Serge, Haywood, Cannon and Gramsci
saw the Bolshevik’s refusal to compromise
socialist principles and their realism as a major factor in convincing
them to sign up. Whereas syndicalists and socialists had succumbed to the war
or repression, the Bolsheviks triumphed. The Bolsheviks were also seen as
facing the reality of revolution, not just spinning theories of what should
happen. These theories were linked to the concrete practices of Bolshevik
power. Georg Lukacs thought that a guiding tenet of Lenin was “that revolution
was already on the agenda.”[250]
The Bolshevik merger of theory and practice proved to be a powerful enticement
to prospective revolutionaries. The merging of theory and practice took place
in the institution of the political party, which was shown vividly in 1917.

The Bolshevik ability to be guided
by revolutionary theory in their practice proved to be a better mechanism of
change than the Sorelian general strike. The theory of the general strike as
formulated by Sorel to destroy capitalism was “a highly abstract conception…It
was taken as an isolated single economic act instead of a phase of a political
revolutionary process.”[251]
The general strike was divorced from concrete activities and perceived as a
single apocalyptic act. The apocalypse never came. Instead, it was the greater
realism and practice of the Bolsheviks that produced the revolution.

What in the end was the elective
affinity between the Bolsheviks and syndicalists/socialists? What was combined?
To be honest, it was really the syndicalists/socialists who merged with the
Bolsheviks. The syndicalists did not abandon their hostility to the established
socialist parties or their revolutionary intransigence. They developed an
appreciation of Marxist theory as a guide to action rather than the general
strike. The syndicalists also moved away from an apolitical reliance on trade
unions to a belief in a revolutionary party that could take over state power.
However, they combined that commitment with the revolutionary praxis of the
Bolsheviks and the Soviet form. The socialists maintained their allegiance to the
political action and Marxism. However, they combined that commitment with the
revolutionary praxis of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet form. Serge, Haywood,
Cannon and Gramsci were comrades who saw the actuality of revolution around
them. Embracing the theory and practice of Bolshevism came naturally out of
their experiences in the prewar revolutionary movement.

Bibliography

Abendroth,
Wolfgang. A Short History of the European
Working Class. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1972.

Adler,
Alan, ed. Theses, Resolutions &
Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third
International. London: Pluto Press, 1983.

[3] Michel Beaud, A
History of Capitalism: 1500-2000 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000),
156 for more detailed statistics on the USA. Also see ibid. 156-7 for the
increasing growth of monopoly capitalism in France, Germany, and Britain.

[4] Beaud, 2000, 158. A more detailed view of the trends in
European capitalism from 1875 to 1914 can be found in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York:
Vintage Books, 1987), 34-55.

[5] For statistics on colonial and military spending of
Europe and the USA see Beaud, 2000, 160-1. For an overview of 19th
century imperialism see Hobsbawm, 1987, 56-83.

[6] The statistics for workers in Germany, France and the USA
can be found in Beaud, 2000, 145-6.

[9] See Hobsbawm, 1987, 132 This challenge to Marxism as a
fatalistic doctrine is effectively refuted in Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 2: The Politics of Social Classes
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), John Molyneux, What is the Real Marxist Tradition? (London: Bookmarks, 1985), and
John Rees, The Algebra of Revolution: The
Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition. (New York: Routledge, 1998).
“Marxism, as the theory and practice of the proletariat revolution, also had to
be the theory and practice of the self-emancipation of the proletariat.” Hal
Draper, Socialism from Below, ed. E.
Haberkern (Alameda: Center for Socialist History, 2005), 321-2. It is beyond
the scope of this essay to consider the profoundly democratic view of Marxism
as the self-emancipation of the working class. Those interested should consult
Michel Lowy, Theory of Revolution in the
Young Marx (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005) and Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation
(Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2002). For a good overview of Marx’s profoundly
democratic vision see August Nimtz, Marx
and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2000). My position is that Marxism is an
inherently democratic doctrine premised on the self-emancipation of the
proletariat through dialectical analysis of capitalism.

[10] For an overview of the divisions of the Second
International over reform and revolution see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86-93.

[11] Dietrich Orlow, A
History of Modern Germany 1871 to the Present (Upper Saddle River: Prentice
Hall, 2002), 46. The success of the party was not just to be found in electoral
results, but also in how the party embraced all aspects of proletariat life.
See Hobsbawm, 1987, 131.

[15] Bernstein’s view can be summed up in this phrase “What is
generally taken as the goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is
everything.”

[16] David Renton, Classical Marxism: Socialist Theory and the Second International
(Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 2002), 21. For the Marxist response to
Bernstein by Rosa Luxemburg see Reform
and Revolution found in Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa
Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1970), 33-90. For more on the Bernstein controversy see Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg (London: Pluto Press,
1994), 55-76.

[17] See Renton,2002, 21. See also James
Joll, The Second International 1889-1914
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), 77-105 for the extended debates
in the International over Bernstein’s revisionism.

[19] The capitulation of the Second International to
nationalist hysteria and defending ‘their’ countries during WWI can be found in
Joll, 1966, 158-183. See also R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, The Zimmerwald Left and the Origins of Communist
Internationalism (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2009), 10-25 for the changing
attitudes of socialist parties toward supporting their respective nations and
armies in 1914.

[20] See Frolich, 1994 for the life and activism of Rosa
Luxemburg, one of the most important antirevisionist revolutionaries in Europe
in the early 20th century.

[25] The General Strike was also embraced by Marxists such as
Rosa Luxemburg under the influence of the 1905 Russian Revolution see Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions
found in Rosa Luxemburg, 1970, 153-218 and Frolich, 1994, 136-56 for more
context on the development of Luxemburg’s ideas on the mass strike.

[28] For divisions among French socialists see Joll, 1966,
85-7, 94-99. Also see Eley, 2002, 97-9 for an overview of syndicalism.

[29] Wolfgang Abendroth, A Short History of the European Working
Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 62. For the controversies
among the French socialists in the Dreyfus Affair see Gary Steenson, After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and
Socialist Working Class Parties in Europe, 1884-1914 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 135-7.

[36] During the war, there was resistance among the socialists
and CGT to France’s participation see Craig Nation, 2009, 119. Also see Eley,
2002, 130, and 135-6 for left-wing resolutions in the French Party and the
growth of strikes.

[38] For a brief history of anarchism in Spain see Gerald
Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: The Social
and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 131-69.

[39] Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-9 (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006), 12. Socialist strategy was also hampered by the corrupt
voting practices and lack of effective representative institutions found in
Spain. See Brenan, 2008, 217-8.

[41] For a much more detailed analysis of the ‘three years of
Bolshevism’ see Beevor, 2006, 13-16.

[42] See Victor Serge, Memoirs
of a Revolutionary (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 1-2.
Serge’s father sympathized with the anarchist-influenced People’s Will and
later joined up with an underground group before entering exile.

[52] Serge, 2002, 34. Serge was later more charitable in one of
his novels, Victor Serge, Men in Prison
(London: Writers and Readers, 1972), 250. Saying “we wanted to be revolutionaries;
we were only rebels.”

[53] Serge, 2002, 47. For Serge’s view of the nature of WWI as
capitalist see ibid. 48.

[75] Serge, 1997, 36. In another pamphlet written to argue with
anarchists to embrace Bolshevism, Serge believed that anarchists needed to
absorb the following theoretical concepts from the Bolshevik experience:
dictatorship of the proletariat, soviets, terror, inevitability of a war of
revolutionary defense, the necessity of powerful revolutionary organizations.
See ibid ibid. 90-5.

[79] Ibid. 117. For an elaboration of
Serge’s view of Leninism as libertarian, see Susan Weissman, ed., Ideas of Victor Serge: A Life as a Work of
Art (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1997), 135-159.

[80] See Serge, 2002, 371-82 for Serge at the end of his life,
still unbowed in his convictions. For Serge’s plea to rethink Marxism in the
1930s from a revolutionary perspective see David Cotterill ed., Serge-Trotsky Papers (London: Pluto
Press, 1994), 176-83.

[81] William D. Haywood, The
Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood (New York: International Publishers,
1969), 12. For the early part of Haywood’s life in Ophir see Ibid. 11-12. There
has been controversy about Haywood’s autobiography, if it was ghost-written,
meant to serve propaganda purposes or heavily edited. The controversy has not
been settled one way or the other. However, Haywood’s biographer Robert Carlson
believes that the book speaks in Haywood’s voice. See Peter Carlson, Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill
Haywood (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983), 328.

[91] James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, The First Labor Movement
and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Anchor Books,
2006), 157.

[92] For May 1st in Chicago, the strike’s epicenter,
see Ibid. 160-5. For a nationwide overview see Goldstein, 2001, 36-8.

[93] It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the
Haymarket Affair and the frame-up of the accused, an excellent source is Green,
2006 especially 173-91 for the bombing itself. See also David Roediger and
Franklin Rosemont, ed., Haymarket
Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986) for a
sympathetic look at the Haymarket Anarchists and many details on the frame-up
of the anarchists along with their worldwide influence.

[99] For a description of Haywood’s introduction to the WFM see
ibid, 62-70.

[100] Philip S. Foner, History
of the Labor Movement in the United States Volume 2: From the Founding of the
AFL to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International
Publishers, 1998), 230.

[107] Ibid. 79. Haywood said that the AFL’s insistence on craft
unionism meant “it isn’t a working class organization. It’s a craft
organization. They form a little job trust. It’s a system of slavery from which
free people ought to break away. And they will soon.” Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago:
Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1998), 50. Needless to say, Haywood thought
his organizations whether WFM or IWW provided the way forward.

[108] Haywood, 1969, 79. Haywood’s radicalization is also
described in Carlson, 1983, 51-2.

[114] Paul LeBlanc, A Short
History of the US Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First
Century (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999), 64.

[115] See Haywood, 1969, 181 and Kornbluh,
1998, 1. There is no mention of political action found in the Preamble to the
IWW Constitution found on ibid. 12-3 after its revision in 1908.

[116] Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States Volume 4: The
Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1917 (New York: International
Publishers, 1997), 76. Debs left the IWW in 1906 because the group wasn’t
putting enough emphasis on political action see Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912
(Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2004) 197.

[117] For IWW history see Foner 1997, Fred
W. Thompson and Jon Bekken. The
Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years 1905-2005 (Cincinnati:
Industrial Workers of the World, 2006), especially chapters 3-9. Also Howard
Zinn, A People’s History of the United
States 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 253-76. See also Paul
Buhle, Marxism in the United States
(New York: Verso, 1991), 97-101 for the background to the founding of the IWW,
its activities and influence in US life.

[119] Primarily from Kipnis, 2004. For influence of rightwing in
SP leadership see ibid. 214-42. For the issues surrounding the expulsion of
Haywood see ibid. 391-420.

[120] Debs was the Left’s most vocal voice in the SP, however he
supported the expulsion of Haywood in 1912 see Bernard J. Brommel, Eugene V. Debs: Spokesman for Labor and
Socialism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1978), 143-5. See
also Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A
Biography of Eugene V. Debs (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1947),
307-8.

[121] See Kipnis, 2004, 111 for class
struggle emphasis of left, for political action and SP left see ibid. 118, IWW
support by SP left see ibid. 190-191. For the influence of economic determinism
on the socialist left see ibid. 108. For the views of a contemporary of Haywood
in the IWW on the SP, decidedly mixed, see James P. Cannon, First Ten Years of American Communism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1962), 245-276.

[122] For events surrounding the Haywood trial see Foner, 1998,
esp 41-6 for how the Idaho prosecution tried to build a case against Haywood.
For undesirable citizens remark see 54. For working class protest at Haywood’s
arrest and the subsequent trial see 51-9. For Deb’s energetic response to the
Haywood arrest see Ginger, 1947, 247 where he says that “if they [Idaho
government] attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million
revolutionists will meet them with guns.”

[123] Haywood, 1969, 230. Kipnis for more on Haywood favoring
political action in 1904 for SP see 192
and for Haywood urging workers to join the SP see 417. In 1906 Haywood ran for
governor of Colorado as the SP candidate see 197.

[124] Haywood, 1969, 230. Haywood on political action in 1912: “I
have likewise urged that every worker that has a ballot should use that ballot
to advance his economic interest.” See also blunt statement “I do believe in
political action because it gives us control of the policeman’s club.” Kipnis,
2004, 414 and 415.

[128] For a short version of the Lawrence
strike see Zinn 335-7, Haywood’s involvement mentioned. For issues surrounding
Lawrence see Foner, 1998, 329-35. For a fellow IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn and her role in Lawrence, see Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl, An Autobiography: My First
Life (1906-1926) (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 127-151. For
Gurley’s impression of Haywood at Lawrence see esp. 130-33. Haywood came to
replace arrested strike leaders. Gurley praises Haywood’s speaking style,
organization, and involvement of women workers. Once Haywood took over strike,
violence largely came to an end see Kipnis, 2004, 414. For the Patterson
strike, see Foner, 1997, 351-372.

[129] Haywood, 1969, 257. No doubt Haywood would attribute this
change in focus on the SP to the fact that a large majority of delegates to the
1912 convention were not workers, of the 293 delegates, fewer than 30 were
workers. The largest occupations represented were 32 newspapermen, 21 lecturers
and 20 lawyers see Kipnis 396-7. On Haywood’s recall, sources are primarily
from Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist
Movement 1897-1912 (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2004) For influence of
rightwing in SP leadership see ibid. 214-42. For the issues surrounding the
expulsion of Haywood see ibid. 391-420.

[130] Haywood, 1969, 258. Haywood was
accused of advocating sabotages and direct action during a rally in support of
IWW organizers in New York. Haywood is reported to have said that direct action
and sabotage were “the shortest way home” for disenfranchised workers. Haywood
also said that US jails were filled by socialists of the IWW, not the political
socialists. However this quote is only a rough estimate of Haywood’s words in
New York, no transcript exists of Haywood’s speech. See Kipnis, 2004, 413-4.
Indeed Sabotage did not necessarily mean advocacy of murder, for example see
Salvatore Salerno ed., Direct Action and
Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s (Chicago: Charles H.
Kerr Publishing Company, 1997) where sabotage is described as “the destruction
of profits to gain a definite, revolutionary, economic end. It may take many
forms.” Such as damaging raw materials, machine breaking, working slowly.
However “sabotage does not seek nor desire to take human life,” ibid. 60. The
SPUSA rescinded section 6 in 1917 see Thompson, 2006, 78. For protests of
Haywood recall by SP members see Theodore Draper, Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 1957,
47-8.

[133] For a description of the strikes in 1919-1920 and the
crushing of labor see Le Blanc, 1999, 70.

[134] For a general history of the
repression of the IWW and the left in general during and after World War One
see Goldstein, 2001, 123-7 and 146-162.

[135] It is beyond the scope of this essay to trace the myriad
factors leading the emergence of the Communist Party of the USA. Those
interested in the topic should consult Buhle, 1991, 107-120 which looks at
bohemians, immigrants, and trade unionists attracted to Bolshevism. See also
Theodore Draper, 1957, 148-175.

[136] Philip S. Foner, History
of the Labor Movement in the United States Volume 7: Labor and World War I
(New York: International Publishers, 1987), 109.

[140] Haywood was attracted to the
revolution and its soviets through reading John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, but remained initially suspicious of
Bolshevik politicians. See Carlson, 1983, 309-10. Reed also wrote articles on
the Russian Revolution, popularizing its ideas and urging socialists to adopt
them. In one article that Haywood may’ve read, Reed asked this question about
the Soviet system-“Is this despotism? It is the real democracy, it is the
workers themselves making the government. By means of such a government the
workers are able to realize freedom, industrial freedom, industrial democracy
and the control of their own lives in their own way.” Philip S. Foner, ed., The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact of
American Radicals, Liberals, and Labor (New York: International Publishers,
1967), 131. Haywood read Reed’s work and was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, but
it wasn’t until 1920 that he embraced Bolshevism.

[151] Ibid. The points about parliamentary
action by Communists are resoundingly similar to those made earlier by Lenin.
See V.I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, An
Infantile Disorder (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 39-48.

[152] Bryan D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left
1890-1928 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 42.

[154] James P. Cannon, The
First Ten Years of American Communism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1962),
65. At the same time that Cannon had a negative view of the Socialist Party, he
still maintained an admiration of Debs that would last for the rest of his life
see Ibid. 267-73. To Cannon Debs had several weaknesses including an aversion
to fighting the reformists for control of the party and seeking an
all-inclusive party of reformists and revolutionaries. Cannon saw Lenin’s
strength as seeking an all-revolutionary party.

[156] Alan M. Wald, The New
York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Amti-Stalinist Left from the
1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987),
169.Vincent St. John was head of IWW.

[160] Ibid. 89. Cannon also believed that the IWW as exemplified
by Vincent St. John had many good qualities such as a revolutionary
spirit/action and hostility to reformism, but that a blanket rejection of all
political action was a mistake for the IWW see Cannon, 1962, 288-92.

[162] Jack Barnes ed., James
P. Cannon: As We Knew Him (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 91. Cannon
was said to have commented later in life that “Trotskyists were Wobblies who
had learned something from the Russian Revolution--the necessity of a
revolutionary working class party.” See Ibid. 130.

[169] Geary, 1989, 191. For Gilotti’s accommodation and welfare
plan and response of PSI see Ibid. 191-4 with the reformist push for a
coalition with Gilotti.

[170] Williams, 1975, 25. For an extended discussion of the labor
strife of Italy in Italy from the 1880s through 1900 and the PSI’s response,
see Geary, 1989, 185-190. The party emerged from the repression strengthened
and gained a great deal of publicity. Party conflicts were submerged in the
face of a common enemy.

[172] For a more general exposition of Turin labor and its
strikes from 1902-13 see Cammett, 1969,
23-31. Ibid. discusses the 1915 strike which opposed Italian
intervention in World War I on 36. The issues on the 1915 strike are more fully
discussed in Williams, 1975, 51-55.

[183] Geary, 2002, 37-9. For the influence
of the revolutionary take-over of the PSI on the young Gramsci, the best analysis is provided
by Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci:
Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977), 65-7 For a
look at the new generation of intellectuals (Borgdia and Gramsci) and worker
militants who joined the PSI or gained influence from 1911 onward see Williams,
1975, 40-51.

[184] However it should be noted that the PSI position was
summarized as neither support nor sabotage. This was not quite the same as
Lenin’s position that can summarized as turn the world war into a civil war for
socialism.

[185] Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton University Press, 1994),
195-214 for an overview on the evolution of Mussolini’s thinking from leftist
to support for the war/proto-fascist.

[187] Geary, 1989, for syndicalists who rallied to Mussolini see
53-4. Also Ibid. 195. By far the best discussion of the syndicalist embrace of
nationalism and the development of the idea of a revolutionary war that would
benefit the nation and its relation to emerging fascism can be found in
Sternhell, 1994, 160-194.

[188] See Davidson, 1977, 7-12 for a description of the
introduction to capitalism in Sardina and the incorporation of Sardina into the
Italian state.

[193] Davidson, 1977, 54. The phrase Vendee of Italy was uttered
by PSI leader Turati. The Vendee refers to peasant counterrevolution uprising
led by preists and royalists against the French Revolution in the 1790s.

[225] William H. McNeil A History of Western Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), 616. For the outbreak of war and the reaction of the socialist
parties see Abendorth, 1972, 65-8. For a very general description of the
effects of voting for war on the SPD in Germany and he growth of dissidence see
Orlow, 2002, 89-90. For some samples of the embrace of the SPD to vulgar forms
of nationalism see Modris Eksteins, Rites
of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2000), 91. See also Nation, 2009, 20-5 for the capitulation of
socialists to their own respective governments.

[226] A traditional and negative view of Bolshevism
can be found in the work of Adam Ulam, The
Bolsheviks (New York: Macmillian 1965). Some works that give a contrary
view are Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political
Thought Volume 1: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution (Chicago:
Haymarket, 2009a) and Neil Harding, Lenin’s
Political Thought Volume 2: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution
(Chicago: Haymarket, 2009b), Lars T. Lih, Lenin
Rediscovered: What is to Be Done? In Context (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008),
Tony Cliff, Lenin Building the Party
1896-1914 (London: Pluto Press: 1975) and Paul LeBlanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
(Amherst: Humanity Books, 1990). One of the best backgrounds of Lenin’s early
development and his embrace of Marxism that is not a hagiography, yet
sympathetic is Leon Trotsky, The Young
Lenin (New York: DoubleDay, 1972).

[227] It is beyond the scope of this essay to dwell on the
development of Russia before WWI; however those interested should consult
Marcel Liebman, Russian Revolution
(New York: Vintage Books. 1970), especially chapters 1 and 2 that provide a
detailed account of Tsarism and the revolutionary opposition. Hobsbawm, 1987,
also has a good overview on Russia looking at the peasantry; industrialization
and the growth of unrest see 292-301. I am also indebted to the view of Trotsky
who provides the framework of uneven and combined development that forms this
interpretation of Russia see Leon Trotsky, History
of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967)
3-16. A very good summary of Russian society on the eve of WWI can be found in
Robert Service, A History of Modern
Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 1-23.

[228] Again see Trotsky 1972. An excellent short summary of the
young Lenin can be found in Neil Harding, Leninism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 15-23. Harding also deals a great deal
with Marxist debates over what the nature of the coming Russian Revolution was
going to be: bourgeoisie or socialist.

[229] The debate over Lenin and the Party encompasses many views
that range from those who see Lenin as a proto-dictator to a great democrat.
For a critical view see Harding, 1996, 23-7. For a major challenge, looking at
Lenin as seeking to create a democratic party based on the German SPD see Lih
2008. Lih is challenged in some respects by August Nimtz, “Lenin-Without Marx
and Engels?” Science and Society 73
(October 2009): 452-473 who believes Lenin was following in Marx’s footsteps of
creating a democratic orientation rather than the SPD. For a good overview of
democratic centralism see also LeBlanc, 1990, 127-141.

[230]Development of
Capitalism in Russia can be found in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 3 (Moscow:
Foreign Language Publishing House, 1960) and V. I. Lenin, “Development of
Capitalism in Russia,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel/index.htm
[accessed November 1, 2009]. See Harding, 1996, 21-3. See also Harding, 2009a,
79-108 for the background of Lenin’s views in Development of Capitalism in Russia. Also Le Blanc, 1990, 29-30 and
102-8 for Lenin’s views on the Russian economy and coming revolution and how
the proletariat and not the bourgeoisie were going to play a leading role. See
also Lenin’s views on the nature of the Russian Revolution written circa 1905.
Vladimir I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social
Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (New York: International Publishers,
1989), 16-22, also 82-5.

[231] Lenin, 1989, 82-5 sums up Lenin’s views nicely. For the
change in Lenin’s views on the Russian Revolution would be socialist not
bourgeoisie see Michael Lowy, The
Politics of Combined and Uneven Development (London: Verso Books, 1981),
58-64. Lowy adheres to Trotsky’s view of the Permanent Revolution.

[235] This view of Lenin is at variance with
that traditionally advanced by scholars. I am indebted to Lars T Lih’s work for
this profoundly democratic interpretation of Lenin. Lih’s work is a major
challenge to the Cold War and Stalinist interpretations of Lenin. For an
effective answer to the charge that Lenin believed that workers couldn’t
achieve socialist consciousness see Lih, 2008, 613-67. Also see Harding, 2009a,
161-96. LeBlanc has written extensively on Lenin and the Party in his work,
What is to be Done is covered in LeBlanc 1990, 58-68. For a shorter account by
Lih that sums up the basic view of Lenin found here see Sebastian Budgen,
Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek, ed. Lenin
Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007), 283-96. See also Cliff 1975 for a corrective.

[236] LeBlanc sums up the Bolsheviks well during the period of
1905 see LeBlanc, 1990, 101-126 and 1912-4 see ibid. 189-208.

[239] For Lenin and the Zimmerwald Movement see Nation. 2009,
63-168. For Lenin’s views specifically on imperialism see ibid. 143-8. For a
view that there is a break in Lenin’s thought in 1914 that led to his works on Imperialism, the State and the Revolution and April
Thesis see Michael Lowy, On Changing
the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, From Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), 77-90.

[240] V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present
Revolution aka. April Theses,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/apr/04.htm
[accessed November 1, 2009].Lenin’s advocacy of immediate socialist revolution
in Russia led him to being condemned as an anarchist in some quarters see
Victor Serge, Victor Serge: The Century
of the Unexpected, Essays on Revolution and Counterrevolution, ed. Al
Richardson (London: Socialist Platform, 1994), 8-14.

[241] See Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Bolsheviks and
the July 1917 Uprising (Indianapolis. Indiana University Press 1968), 62-4,
100-2, and 138-46. For how the Bolsheviks and anarchists largely cooperated
during the Russian Revolution of 1917 see Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1975), 196-8.

[242] This process is admirably described by Alexander
Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power:
Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York. W.W. Norton and Company 1978)
and Trotsky 1967. Also Liebman, 1970 especially 161-86 and 257-92.

[243] The Paris Commune was an experiment in direct democracy
under workers control that existed for two months in 1871. See Karl Marx, Civil War in France (New York
International Publishers, 1993).

[248] It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the
degeneration of the Russian Revolution from its Leninist beginnings to
Stalinist counterrevolution. Suffice to mention here that the subsequent civil
war with the massive destruction of the proletariat, alienation of peasantry,
militarization of Soviet life and isolation of the revolution led to the
development of a bureaucratic caste of Stalin. This process is described
admirably in Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed:
What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (New York Pathfinder Press,
1972). See also Victor Serge, Year One of
the Russian Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972),
Liebman 1975. Also Paul LeBlanc 1990, 289-340, Harding, 2009b, 275-308. A
recent contribution is Alexander Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). For the Purges and culmination
of Stalin’s counterrevolution see Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Greenfield Park: Mehring Books,
1998) and Vadim Z. Rogovin, Stalin’s
Terror of 1937-8: Political Genocide in the USSR (Greenfield Park: Mehring
Books, 2009).

Comments

The Bolshevik ability to be guided by revolutionary theory in their practice proved to be a better mechanism of change than the Sorelian general strike. The theory of the general strike as formulated by Sorel to destroy capitalism was “a highly abstract conception…It was taken as an isolated single economic act instead of a phase of a political revolutionary process.”[251] The general strike was divorced from concrete activities and perceived as a single apocalyptic act. The apocalypse never came. Instead, it was the greater realism and practice of the Bolsheviks that produced the revolution.

What in the end was the elective affinity between the Bolsheviks and syndicalists/socialists? What was combined? To be honest, it was really the syndicalists/socialists who merged with the Bolsheviks. The syndicalists did not abandon their hostility to the established socialist parties or their revolutionary intransigence. They developed an appreciation of Marxist theory as a guide to action rather than the general strike. The syndicalists also moved away from an apolitical reliance on trade unions to a belief in a revolutionary party that could take over state power. However, they combined that commitment with the revolutionary praxis of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet form. The socialists maintained their allegiance to the political action and Marxism. However, they combined that commitment with the revolutionary praxis of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet form. Serge, Haywood, Cannon and Gramsci were comrades who saw the actuality of revolution around them. Embracing the theory and practice of Bolshevism came naturally out of their experiences in the prewar revolutionary movement.

This is a superb essay. It really helps to understand the dilemma that we are facing today. And what needs to be done.

The IWW was itself a mix of all the tendencies. Out of that experience we got Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster, and others becoming leaders of the US Communist Party, Ralph Chaplin as an anti-capitalist etc. The IWW had their own publication on their relationship to the Bolshevik revolution:

This is an edited transcript of a talk presented at the Marxism 2012 conference.

One hundred years ago, the majority of socialists believed that political action should be focused on parliamentary politics. They wanted to fight capitalism but agreed to play by its rules. They were reformists. And there were perks: for the parliamentarians themselves, flattery and comfort, and the occasional invite to an exclusive party. For the union leaders, legal protection – in return, of course, for assurances against immoderate strikes. If the workers were lucky, they got a few concessions. But mostly they weren’t lucky.

In many countries, syndicalism was the response to the sorry state in which the mainstream socialist moment had ended up. Syndicalism put forward three related answers to the problem of capitalist politics.

Firstly, they remembered Marx’s advice: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”. They were for working class revolution, and to their enormous credit, they defended the idea that workers could and would achieve this.

Secondly, they advocated the organisation of the working class into “One Big Union”. In other words, in place of political organisation, they were for industrial organisation – and this industrial organisation would eventually unite the working class to smash capitalism.

Thirdly, the syndicalists imbued a deep disgust among their members toward parliamentarians, academics, philanthropists, union bureaucrats and other would-be saviours of the class.

And of all the syndicalists who were disgusted with reformism none were as disgusted as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

The Australian IWW

The IWW called Billy Hughes, the WW1-era Labor prime minister who was expelled from his own party over conscription,

a blackleg little scoundrel who has done more to break strikes and keep the workers bound to the masters’ treadmill for the past ten years, than all the straight-out capitalist politicians and the influence of the whole capitalist press of Australia combined.

And, of political action (i.e. reform), they wrote:

Reform of politics is useless. The elector, instead of bolting like sheep at bogeys, should clear his brain of deep-rooted prejudices (and) become a conscious person... why support a gigantic system of charlatanism and oppression? A conscious abstentionist (someone who refuses to vote) counts for far more socially than a gullible voter.

The IWW (the “Wobblies”) stood for revolution. The preamble to their constitution read:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common... Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.

The Wobblies believed that workers had to be convinced or cajoled into joining “One Big Union”. This union would be different to the mass of old, small craft unions that covered tiny professional subdivisions. Rather, the IWW stood for industrial unionism – they would organise the workers into 6 industrial divisions, which would be federated. Citing a simplified form of historical materialism, they argued that this form of organisation was in line with economic progress and was the “scientific” means of uniting the working class.

Superficially, there is affinity between IWW-ism and anarcho-syndicalist ideology. But this is not how the IWW saw itself at all. They were at pains to distinguish themselves from the Australian anarchist scene, which existed on the far fringes of society, and was highly individualistic. Moreover, references to Marx abound in their paper, Direct Action. They saw themselves as applying and extending Marx’s ideas. The IWW mail-order library would gladly supply Marxist classics for a few shillings, including 3 volumes of Capital, Wages, Price and Profits and the Communist Manifesto. Other favourites included pamphlets on sabotage and The Right to Be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue. Some anarchists, like Kropotkin or Bakunin were occasionally cited, but not so much in defence of worked out anarchist concepts, rather for their general exhortations to revolution or cautions against the state. They didn’t sell anarchist literature. This marks the IWW out specifically from European syndicalism which was always more influenced by classical anarchism.

The IWW clearly understood and took seriously many of Marx’s economic arguments. Time and again, they explained that workers produce all the value, and yet receive only a paltry fraction of it. They also admired Marx’s revolutionary intransigence and insistence on working class self-activity. But their understanding of revolution was vague. Sometimes they conceded that defensive violence would be necessary, at other times they attempted to find a peaceful road to revolution. Some Direct Action articles advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat and an “industrial state” to oppose the capitalist state, whereas others simply envisioned the IWW leading a mass strike and taking over production.

Their approach relied heavily on propaganda. A typical week’s activity for the Wobblies saw an educational meeting on Monday or Tuesday night, usually on economics, a business meeting on Wednesday, an advertised public meeting on Friday or Saturday and on Sunday, a big (often with hundreds of attendees) outdoor meeting in Sydney’s Domain or by Melbourne’s Yarra. IWW locals often maintained workers’ libraries, and they held regular programs training speakers and educators who would travel the country, spreading the truth and supporting themselves through collections and selling literature.

Of course, at work, IWW members were encouraged to take action. This action varied from go-slows (the IWW was fond of saying “fast workers die young”) to sabotage, to direct action in pursuit of higher wages. Much of the time IWW members didn’t last long on a particular job – they weren’t employee of the month material. But when they did, or when they found themselves in concentrations at a given workplace, they could lead and participate in important struggles.

One such action was the 1915 mining strike in Broken Hill. Alongside revolutionary socialists, IWW members used direct action (in this case, relaxing on Saturday afternoons) in order to win the 44 hour week. They used on the job organising, including underground (literally) meetings, and defied the arbitration courts, the union bureaucracy and the war time patriotic furore. Broken Hill was the one place in Australia where an IWW card was regarded in the same light as any other union membership.

Just as their opposition to parliamentary politics did not make the IWW apolitical, their insistence on direct action did not preclude political campaigning. The most important and heroic struggle the IWW were involved in was against WW1 and conscription. The fact that they opposed WW1 without hesitation is worthy of commendation in itself: all over the world, socialist parties, syndicalists and anarchists capitulated to the pro-war fervour. Even the US IWW hesitated before opposing the war.

The Australian IWW came out swinging at their vitriolic best. At the outbreak of war, the IWW covered the town with posters reading: “TO ARMS, Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians, Landlords, Newspaper Editors and Other Stay-at-home Patriots. Your country needs YOU in the trenches! Workers, follow your masters!” When Direct Action editor, Tom Barker was charged with prejudicing recruitment, he defended himself arguing that the poster was a sincere attempt to support the war effort!

During this campaign, IWW activists spoke at hundreds of meetings, to crowds of thousands and to rallies of tens of thousands. They carried motions in union meetings around the country. They simultaneously cooperated with and criticised mercilessly those to their right who only opposed conscription without opposing the war, and in so doing, they drew the whole campaign to the left. Much more could be said about their fight against conscription, but suffice to say, it stands as a model of revolutionary campaigning. They earned the shrill ire of the entire capitalist establishment, from parliament down, while winning thousands of members and tens of thousands of supporters.

Yet, by the time the war was over, and despite their burgeoning popularity, the IWW were wrecked. Essentially, Labor governments, both state and federal, conspired with the capitalist press to mercilessly persecute the organisation. Twelve Wobblies were framed on arson charges, one of whom received a maximum of 15 years. The case was shonky from beginning to end. The prosecution relied on the testimony of one scab that was so unreliable that he was later beaten to death by police who were afraid he would go public with the truth. Yet the case set the tone. Labor banned the IWW. All over the country, Wobblies lost their jobs, were imprisoned or charged and were otherwise intimidated out of membership.

In the end, the IWW did not make it into the 1920s in any recognisable form. Some of their members, but not too many, joined the Communist Party. Others simply continued to be committed union militants.

Criticisms of IWW politics

It is important to account for why the IWW was wrecked. Doing so is effectively the only way to save the effort of thousands of dedicated revolutionaries from historical waste. But before this, it’s important to look at some of the limitations of their approach to politics.

Firstly, while their militant hostility to the trade union bureaucracy was positive, their criticism of it was couched in organisational terms rather than political ones. The union bureaucracy is an inevitable by-product of any union organisation under capitalism – industrial unions are no more immune than craft unions or general unions. This is for a few reasons.

So long as capitalism is stable, unions of any size are going to accept industrial legality. Either this, or be de-registered and wrecked, as with the Builders Labourers Federation. This legality means that a layer of bureaucrats will inevitably emerge whose role is to mediate between workers and capital. To put it more critically, they haggle with the capitalist class over the price of wage slaves.

The other side of the problem is that so long as capitalism is powerful, capitalist ideology and the basic alienation and disempowerment of working class life will prevent large numbers from becoming revolutionary. In the final analysis, the best and only guard against union bureaucrats are revolutionary workers, yet for a majority of workers in a given industry to be revolutionary is unthinkable outside of a revolutionary situation.

The IWW’s organisational answer to a political problem led them to support the formation of a separate union. They disdained the idea of building rank and file networks within the existing unions. Describing the conservatism and corruption of the unions, they wrote: “How can anyone who is honestly fighting for the betterment of his class bore on in such a heart-breaking and degrading environment?”

Organising a separate, radical union in opposition to the mainstream ones is a mistaken tactic 95 percent of the time. It was especially mad in Australia – at the time one of the best unionised countries in the world. The reality was, most workers had a loyalty to their unions and could not be persuaded to leave them for another tiny one, even if they sympathised with IWW ideas. As such, the IWW never came close to realising its goal. Worse still, “red unionism” can be a left wing form of capitulation to the union bureaucracy. Rather than take the fight to the bureaucrats, constantly organising within the unions against them, it leaves them unchallenged within their own organisations, and has the effect of separating the best militants.

Pragmatically, most IWW members did work within the existing unions. Yet the strategy confused them. It meant that more often than not, their approach was sectarian: they actively counter-posed themselves to the existing working class parties and unions. Their approach was like an ultimatum: join the IWW or be damned. This, combined with some of their emphasis on sabotage, isolated them from thousands of serious working class militants who were, at the time, moving very rapidly towards revolutionary ideas.

The alternative tactic to this is what was carried out by Communists (for all their Stalinist limitations) in the Builders Labourers Federation through the 1950s and 60s. They did careful, patient, detailed rank and file organising. When necessary, they proved to workers in practice – through strikes and other actions – that the Communists were the best militants. Eventually they wrestled control of the BLF away from its right wing leadership. In so doing, they built the most radical union this country has seen.

We need to go further in criticism. The IWW’s syndicalism meant that they misunderstood themselves and their role. The IWW were, for all intents and purposes, a revolutionary party. They functioned exactly like one. They recruited to a high level of politics and demanded a high level of activity from their members. They used political propaganda expertly and intervened in campaigns and struggles to win people to a revolutionary perspective.

Yet they didn’t have a perspective for building a party. Such a perspective can anticipate and cope with periods of illegality. When confronted by state repression they reacted with semi-suicidal bravado. They threatened to fill the jails with Wobblies, and in Broken Hill challenged the authorities to arrest their members by plastering their membership lists to the doors of their meeting hall.

The state made good on its threat and wrecked the organisation. There was a massive defence campaign for the 12 arrested IWW members, which eventually saw them released. This campaign drew in leftists, unionists and even Labor party branches. Yet the IWW never recovered. They were too broken; too demoralised. Their perspective hadn’t prepared them for what happened. This was a huge setback for working class politics. Had the IWW been able to weather the repression, they could have emerged in the early 1920s strengthened. As it happened the immense ambition of the IWW and their ultra-radical disdain for the union movement had the effect of limiting the organisation. These problems were undoubtedly partly borne of their syndicalism.

Conclusion

The IWW were trail-blazers. They were also fighting to work out a revolutionary working class strategy before the experience of the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution and subsequent 20th century revolutions had decisively resolved most of the questions they were struggling with. And their victories were victories for the whole class – not least of all, their victory against conscription. So whatever we have to say about the IWW’s politics, we can also say that this was a first rate organisation of fighters from whose spirit and courage we can learn a huge amount from.

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A Reply to ‘One Big Union? The IWW in Australia’

In April, an edited transcript of a talk given by Daniel Lopez at Marxism 2012 entitled ‘One Big Union? The IWW in Australia’ appeared on the Socialist Alternative website. This article, in offering a discussion and critique of the IWW and of syndicalism more generally, appeared to present the historical Industrial Workers of the World primarily as a syndicalist response to attempts to reform class society that took its cues primarily from Marxism. However, just as the IWW ‘remembered Marx’s advice: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,”’ Lopez contended, so too were they ‘at pains to distinguish themselves from the Australian anarchist scene, which existed on the far fringes of society, and was highly individualistic.’

As such, Lopez argued, the Wobblies were ‘trail-blazers’ who ‘were also fighting to work out a revolutionary working class strategy before the experience of the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution and subsequent 20th century revolutions had decisively resolved most of the questions they were struggling with.’ In order however to ‘to save the effort of thousands of dedicated revolutionaries from historical waste, it was also necessary to understand their limitations—and, paradoxically perhaps given that they were ‘trail-blazers,’ the folly of their syndicalist ways. This appeared to be revealed in the state repression inflicted on the Wobblies, who, in not having ‘perspective for building a party’ that could ‘anticipate and cope with periods of illegality’ inevitably found themselves unable to recover.

While the issue of state repression is certainly a pertinent one to consider given the history of its use against the IWW in Australia, whether this of necessity negates revolutionary or anarcho-syndicalist strategies and forms of organisation as such is arguably much less clear-cut than Daniel Lopez would have us believe. The fact that Lopez’s argument against the IWW’s approach to class struggle appears to centre on the issue of responses to state repression would also appear to put the cart before the horse in terms of the kinds of basic democratic assumptions that function to defend the freedom of the individual against the workings of arbitrary, coercive power structures.

What we are talking about here of course is putting the onus on power structures to justify themselves to the individual rather than the other way around; where we place the onus on power structures to justify themselves to the individual, we can arguably be said to be defending the cause of freedom, but where we place the onus on the individual (or on organisations such as the IWW that seek to defend the freedom of the individual against, in this instance, the autocratic hierarchies inherent to capitalist relations of production) to justify their opposition to power, we can in contradistinction arguably be said to be defending oppressive power structures at the expense of the freedom of all individuals. It is the argument of the present text that this is very much manifest in the article by Daniel Lopez.

Thus we find in Lopez’s article no mention of the basic rationales informing the development of revolutionary or anarcho-syndicalism, though these are readily available. The same is also true of the historical evidence supporting arguments against the traditional vanguardist modes of organisation upon which organisations such as Socialist Alternative operate. It would appear to be worth noting that Lopez’s critique of the syndicalism of the IWW appears to take for granted the legitimacy of the vanguardist model. In not even holding the concept of vanguardism open to comparison or scrutiny would appear to beg the question as to what the author fears from presenting both sides of the debate honestly and straightforwardly and allowing his readers to make up their own mind. This would in turn seem to support the observation made above to the effect that putting the onus on individuals to justify their opposition to power tends to support oppressive power structures at the expense of individuals insofar as it reflects a desire to make people’s minds up for them, which would appear to be a facet of the kind of things it would be nice to rid ourselves of in pursuit of a basically sane and just society.

In contrast to the claims Lopez makes about the Wobblies’ rejection of anarchism as ‘individualistic’ (an odd claim considering the oft-sectarian behaviour of many members of Socialist Alternative), we find that the syndicalism of the IWW evolved in the first place from the conjoining of classical liberal critiques of arbitrary statist autocracy, particularly in terms of their negative effects on the dignity of the individual, and Marxist critiques of the aforementioned autocratic hierarchies defining capitalist relations of production, to produce a libertarian socialist critique of the state as a class institution whose primary function, to borrow from James Madison, is to ‘protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.’ The appearance of revolutionary or anarcho-syndicalism in particular came about as individuals such as the French anarchist and unionists Fernand Pelloutier recognised in the unions a means of developing a ‘practical school of socialism’ and ‘the seeds of the future society’ based on an economically democratic regime of workers’ control wherein production and distribution were run through unions based on collective decision-making and industrial federations and confederations within which decision-making power flowed from the bottom up.

Through these ‘facts of the future,’ syndicalists such as Pelloutier argued, workers could build on their day-to-day experience at the point of production to build solidarity and organise on the basis of libertarian strategies that acknowledged the axiomatic importance of maintaining a basic harmony between mean and ends, given the fact that the means we employ tend to determine our outcomes. The basic justification for syndicalism thus resulted from the need to avoid perpetuating in the workers organisations precisely those hierarchical and autocratic constraints on the freedom of the individual that appeared to necessitate their formation in the first place. In seeking to avoid replicating the forms of oppression that they sought to overcome the aim of revolutionary syndicalists such as Pelloutier was of course to avoid becoming what they claimed to oppose, and thereby to realise Marx’s maxim that ‘the emancipation of the working class will be carried out by the workers themselves’—in this case directly, by actual wage workers, and not by professional revolutionaries who claimed to speak in their name while apparently having little or no involvement in the process of production.

This brings us back again to the issue of placing the onus on power to justify itself to the individual, particularly where the issue of the vanguard model of organisation is concerned. While Lopez argues that the IWW failed by virtue of the fact that we were delayed in our project of resistance to the injustice and general insanity of class society thanks to the state repression inflicted on the historical Wobblies, thereby apparently demonstrating the validity of the vanguardist model, he ignores many of the more obvious historical examples that would seem to demonstrate the much greater failures of vanguardism. One need only think about for example the way Stalin used the assassination of Sergei Kirov by what many historians now agree were agents of the NKVD as a pretext to crack down on the last of the internal opposition to his despotism within the Russian Communist Party in the name of defending the workers’ revolution from counter-revolutionary terrorists, petit-bourgeois Trotskyist elements, etc.

Here the grave potential for abuse implicit in the vanguardist argument in favour of the need for a workers’ state to defend the gains of the workers’ revolution from counter-revolutionary elements seemed fairly clear; as Stalin’s actions demonstrated it was no difficult task to demonise anyone who failed to worship the ground he walked on with the requisite level of awe by accusing them of plotting to overthrow the revolutionary workers’ state and restore capitalism. In this way it appeared to be no difficult task at all for Stalin to blame the victims of the Red Terror for his unconscionable power grab, just as it was no difficult task at all for him to play the victim of sinister outside forces said to be threatening the Revolutionary Socialist way of life in a manner that should ring alarm bells for anyone who lived through the Terror Scare of 2001 or is perhaps otherwise familiar with such things as the Red Scares of the 20th Century, the Nazi treatment of German Jews, the Israeli treatment of Palestinians (attempting to overcome the historical legacy of fascism by adoping it, etc.) the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages or Arthur Miller’s fantastic stage play The Crucible. There are of course other notorious historical examples associated with the Russian Revolution (eg. the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion) that would seem to raise serious questions about the legitimacy of the vanguardist model of organisation, but they are surely too familiar to anyone likely to read this article to merit discussion.

In placing the onus on power to justify itself to the individual in the manner appropriate to anyone who would defend individual freedom from state or economic autocracy (instead of attempting to save the latter from the former), serious questions might conceivably be raised then about the history of the vanguardist model that appears to be Daniel Lopez’s preferred alternative to the revolutionary syndicalism of the IWW. This being the case, it would seem somewhat anachronistic then to argue in favour of a vanguardist model of organisation in the name of defending the revolutionary movement from state repression if the end result is a purportedly revolutionary state that represses dissent and any other manifestations of independent thought and action in the name of defending the workers’ revolution from evil bogeymen in a manner that has already been demonstrated historically to be a device for establishing and perpetuating tyranny at the great expense of any attempts to resist the aforementioned injustices and general insanity characteristic of class society, if not to say the good name of the concept of socialism as such. If the means we employ determine our outcomes as was implicit in the notions of the early syndicalists, then organising on the basis of hierarchical vanguards in the name of saving the revolutionary movement from state repression would appear then to amount to its own certain defeat to the extent that the it reproduced that which it was attempting to overcome and in so doing became what it claimed to oppose.

This is of course not to suggest that the issue of how we respond to the certain state repression to come as soon as the threat of democracy begins to weigh on the minds of James Madison’s “opulent few” merits no further attention; quite the contrary. If history clearly illustrates the class nature of the state as it certainly does, then it also similarly demonstrates that the ‘minority of the opulent’ whom the state protects ‘from the majority’ will stop at nothing to protect their economic privileges and the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed, no matter how socially, economically or environmentally unsustainable they may be, from any and all attempts to establish a classless society that involves any real measure of control over the course of their own destiny or material justice for human beings writ large.

Such reactions of the future will no doubt appear either in the form of further Terror Scares that seek to establish further pretexts for state terrorism and autocratic crackdowns on dissent and other manifestations of independent thought in the name of fighting non-state terrorism, or simply as some kind of corporatist police state invoked in the name of fighting terrorism and maintaining order while perpetuating state terror and laying the groundwork for social, economic, environmental and indeed psychological chaos. Anticipating these will of course necessitate developing appropriate organisational forms, though Daniel Lopez appears to provide no argument why these of necessity must follow the vanguardism that seems to the preferred model of Socialist Alternative. Indeed, if we take a cursory look at the history of syndicalism, we can find examples of libertarian organising against dictatorship and state repression from which syndicalists emerged relatively unscathed, such as the three months of martial law that the Spanish CNT was subjected to following the ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909, and the entire Primo De Rivera dictatorship of 1923-30. Here the affinity group model of the Federacion Anarquista Iberica (FAI) appeared to offer plenty of potential for combining organisation against state repression with libertarian strategies that maintained a basic harmony between means and ends and allowed for the resumption of union organising activities in periods of relative openness.

In critiquing the IWW on the basis of the argument that the historical Wobblies were unable to respond effectively to the state repression visited on them, and that this somehow apparently constitutes evidence for the supposed failure of syndicalism as such, Lopez refers only to the historical IWW and not the present IWW, which in experiencing a marked resurgence in the last year especially would appear to call into question the notion of our inability to recover. A similar failure to acknowledge the activities of the present IWW in the name of defending the vanguardist or party form of organisation also seems to inspire other fairly predictable objections to of our structure and strategies, primary amongst which being the old chestnut about the Wobblies being class reductionists who don’t care about non-economic issues such as fighting racism, sexism and homophobia and defending the natural environment. Nothing of course could be further from the truth, and in fact the present-day IWW is very proactive about recognising that a multitude of different forms of oppression exist and that the mentality that sees the worker primarily as an objectified resource whose value resides primarily in its exploitability is very much similar to and comes from much the same place as the mentality that sees women and the natural environment the same way.

Admittedly we haven’t yet regained the crowning heights of our former glory, much less to say formed anything much in the way of a credible threat to the pervasive injustices, general insanity and increasingly overt chaos of the class society that we are obliged to navigate, though by the same token this would not appear to be something that is unique to us. The fact that Daniel Lopez appears to feel the need to form such a critique at this time would appear to suggest a tacit acknowledgement of the resurgence of the Australian IWW, which in and of itself would seem to contradict its own basic assumptions.

Ben D. x368045

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Replying to the IWW on the IWW

By Daniel Lopez

I was delighted to see that the Melbourne branch of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) had taken the time to write a response to my article on the historic IWW in Australia. By the end, my delight had turned to despair. In 2,500 words Ben D managed to simultaneously ignore the main arguments running through my article and wheel out the usual, tired anarchist clichés about revolutionary socialism. I would have appreciated an in depth debate about the historic IWW in Australia. Ben treats the historical issues perfunctorily, preferring to grind a much worn old axe.

Anarcho-syndicalism, individualism and the IWW

Ben accuses me of failing to give an account of the development of anarcho syndicalism out of the anarchist tradition. This would no doubt be a failing in an article on anarcho syndicalism. But my article was on the IWW. They didn’t see themselves as either anarchists or anarcho syndicalists. In fact the IWW explicitly rejected anarchism. Norman Rancie, the one-time editor of Direct Action, had this to say:

Anarchists believe in complete individual freedom and each man a law unto himself. They refuse to recognise any form of organisation or authority. This is the very antithesis of the principles of the IWW which believes in organisation, discipline, and not ‘every man a law unto himself’, but every member responsible to his organisation which has a book of rules and a constitution which of course is the very negation of anarchism.1

This is not an isolated quote. Numerous Direct Action articles directly criticised anarchism, as well as European Syndicalism.2 The anarchists of the day agreed, criticising the IWW in turn.3 The IWW regularly advertised literature for sale, and organised reading groups and study sessions on this literature. There is very little on their list that could be considered classically anarchist. The closest is Paul Lafargue’s classic The Right to be Lazy, which the astute browser will notice is also for sale in Socialist Alternative’s bookshop. The overwhelming bulk of IWW literature is classically Marxist, or written by and for the IWW.

Moreover, on a number of political grounds, they differed from classical anarchism. While opposing parliamentary action, they were not apolitical or anti-political.4 There was not a trace of Emma Goldman’s scorn towards the masses in IWW material, although they did despise the “blockhead” Labor Party adherent. While an atheist organisation, they did not make anti-religious propaganda a point of honour, preferring to unite workers above religious divides. Indeed, the only people at the time who seriously argued that the IWW was anarchist or anarcho syndicalist were Labour Party politicians and journalists.

Of course, in flavour, the IWW has some similarity with anarcho-syndicalism. The IWW held some positions which some anarchists or anarcho syndicalists also hold. But then again, revolutionary socialists hold some positions that anarcho syndicalists hold. In the same way, a few individuals that had been associated with the Melbourne Anarchist Club in the late 1800s, such as the impressive Monty Miller, joined the IWW. But then, some European anarchists became Bolsheviks.

You could draw a Venn diagram if you wanted. But the main point stands: the IWW was by no sensible measure part of the anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist tradition. This is not the case today, and has not been since the 1970s.5 But then, I was not talking about the present day IWW. I was writing an article about labour history. Regrettably, the IWW today doesn’t have much to do with organised labour and certainly hasn’t made any history.

Vanguardism, statism, and other anarchist swear-words.

Ben accuses me of arguing in a way that reinforces state power. He writes:

What we are talking about here of course is putting the onus on power structures to justify themselves to the individual rather than the other way around… but where we place the onus on the individual (or on organisations such as the IWW that seek to defend the freedom of the individual against, in this instance, the autocratic hierarchies inherent to capitalist relations of production) to justify their opposition to power, we can in contradistinction arguably be said to be defending oppressive power structures at the expense of the freedom of all individuals. It is the argument of the present text that this is very much manifest in the article by Daniel Lopez.

This argument is a centrepiece in Ben’s response. But let’s look at it in more detail. He is saying that by criticising the IWW’s failure to anticipate and cope with state repression, I am defending the state. Yet, the whole point of my argument is that an organisation dedicated to overthrowing capitalism should be able to resist the state! This wasn’t my main argument, but that’s beside the point. I wonder if Ben extends this logic to other issues. For instance, if I criticise union officials for their failure to beat an employer, say, by not anticipating the use of scab labour, am I defending the employer? Or if I criticise state repression in the USSR, am I siding with US imperialism? This type of logic only serves to shut down discussion.

A revolutionary organisation needs to be able to endure periods of illegality. The IWW was patently unprepared for this. In some areas, they defied the ban on their organisation by publishing membership lists and defying the authorities to fill the prisons.6 The authorities obliged. The strategy did not work. In other words, it is quite clear that some of the actions and perspectives of the IWW contributed towards their destruction, and at the very least, rendered them incapable of enduring repression.

I wish this had not been the case! Understanding what limited the IWW therefore involves a degree of criticism. Yet, according to Ben, doing this is “defending oppressive power structures at the expense of the freedom of all individuals”. This approach prevents us learning from past revolutionary attempts and as such it needs to be completely rejected. As I’ve said before, a certain amount of humility is required in criticising the IWW: no organisation on the Australian far left has had to endure state repression in recent history. But, this said, is perfectly valid to criticise the IWW on this ground, and Ben is profoundly wrong to accuse me of statism for doing so.

Ben also accuses me of stealthily assuming the validity of “vanguardism”, so as to hoodwink my audience into agreeing. In his mind, this is a “facet” of my proclivity for demanding that individuals justify themselves to power. I am told that “it reflects a desire to make people’s minds up for them”. All this would be bad enough, but Ben goes further. He writes:

Here [in the persecution of Stalin’s rivals] the grave potential for abuse implicit in the vanguardist argument in favour of the need for a workers’ state to defend the gains of the workers’ revolution from counter-revolutionary elements seemed fairly clear; as Stalin’s actions demonstrated it was no difficult task to demonise anyone who failed to worship the ground he walked on with the requisite level of awe by accusing them of plotting to overthrow the revolutionary workers’ state and restore capitalism.

So, there you have it. It’s a short trip from implicit “vanguardism” to the gulag. Never mind that Stalin had to murder, imprison or drive to suicide almost every Bolshevik party member who had been active in 1917. Never mind that Stalin’s regime was state capitalist and destroyed working class resistance mercilessly. It was vanguardism what done it! In the same paragraph, Ben manages to mention Nazism, the repression of the Palestinians and the War on Terror as related phenomena. This is too much! Here I was thinking that imperialism and capitalism were responsible for those things, but turns out it was “vanguardism” the whole time.

It should go without saying that this is all idealist nonsense. Classes make history. Ruling classes unleash oppression. They may use arguments to justify this (and rarely do these arguments have anything to do with “vanguardism” which has more currency as an anarchist bogey than anything else). But to blame the argument used to justify the abuse, rather than the class committing the abuse is a grave mistake. And to accuse me of implicit vanguardism, and then to link this to Stalinism, Nazism, etc. is not a very helpful way to conduct debate.

Nevertheless, there is a lot to be said about “vanguardism”. The term is much abused. A vanguard, in the classic Marxist understanding, is simply an advanced section of the working class – advanced in terms of politics and militancy. For instance, with reference to the Egyptian revolution, you can say that the Mahalla workers are clearly the in the vanguard. They are the most militant workers, and have led the way for other struggles a number of times. This leading section of the working class – the vanguard - may or may not be organised in a political party.

For much of the 20th century, the vanguard of the Australian working class was organised by the Communist Party. This is very different to “vanguardism”. “Vanguardism” has come to refer to the bankrupt, sectarian politics of tiny orthodox Trotskyist sects who proclaim themselves to be the vanguard of the working class. This is elitism, and is a total corruption of Marxism. Neither I nor Socialist Alternative have anything in common with this approach: we do not consider ourselves to be the vanguard of anything much, let alone the Australian working class.

The IWW itself functioned in a manner not unlike the self-proclaimed “vanguard party” that Ben imagines me advocating. The IWW recruited only revolutionary workers and denounced those who hadn’t seen the light of One Big Union. It disdained and scorned activity in the mainstream unions. The idea that it was even possible for the IWW to organise the majority of the working class, as they envisaged, was utopian. So, the IWW was left organising the most revolutionary workers in the name of the whole working class. This blurred the distinction between revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries, tending to cut these workers off from their more reformist comrades.

In other words, the IWW’s politics and practice were effectively a form of sectarian “vanguardism”. This was reflected in a number of the IWW’s positions. Sabotage, while justifiable from an abstract, ethical point of view, is hardly a tactic designed to win over waverers. Their hostility to parliamentary politics, while borne of a healthy hatred of Laborism, (which according to Lenin is the “beginning of all wisdom“) was hardly intended to challenge bourgeois politics in order to win over those with illusions in parliamentarism.

This is not to say that they got everything wrong: my original article spent a long time praising the IWW, especially for their work at Broken Hill and during World War One. And these are just two examples. They had both guts and principles! Moreover, at the time, their mistakes were more understandable. Given the low political level of the Australian workers movement, they represented a step forward.

In many ways, the IWW was grappling with an issue that confronts all revolutionaries: how to relate to the majority of the working class that is not yet revolutionary? The IWW answered this question in a novel way: they attributed the failure of the union movement to challenge capitalism to the structure of the union movement. So they advocated an all new union, with a more democratic, modern, industrial structure, and with revolutionary politics. The problem with this answer is, as I said above, that it tended to reinforce differences between IWW workers and the rest of the working class.

Socialists, on the other hand, believe that revolutionary workers should form a democratic mass party, dedicated to revolutionary principles. We believe that this party should organise within the unions, and engage with the broadest layers of workers possible. This party should fight openly for revolutionary politics in the workplaces, in the streets and in every forum available to us. But, we do not expect to convince people through preaching, nor by pretending that we are the whole working class. We believe that struggle educates, and that in struggle we can prove the worth of revolutionary politics.

So, while upholding our politics, we won’t allow our politics to become a barrier to unity in struggle. Socialist Alternative doesn’t claim to be a revolutionary party, but this is the logic guiding our intervention into political campaigns, such as in the Refugee Action Collective, and the strike support work we do, such as that we are currently doing at the Toll strike in Melbourne. This is a very different logic to that espoused by the historic IWW.

Ben finished his criticism by suggesting, somewhat self-flatteringly, that I was motivated to write my initial talk and article by the “resurgence” of the IWW today. What can I say? I got 99 problems, but the IWW ain’t one. Rather, I believe that revolutionaries can learn a lot by studying the historic IWW. Similarly, we both stand to learn something in a debate – so here’s to hoping that future Wobbly contributions to the debate do more justice to the tradition and bite of the historic IWW.

1Burgmann, Verity. Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia.
Cambridge University press, 1995, p. 43

2Direct Actions 13/5/16, p.5; 15/12/14, p.4, 15/5/15, p.2

3Burgmann, Verity. Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia.
Cambridge University press, 1995, p. 43

4Direct Action 15/11/14, p.3

5Burgmann, Verity. Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia.
Cambridge University press, 1995, p. 274

One of the most interesting and useful things I learned from reading Enaa's essay is the parallel between the collapse of the Second International and an almost identical development among the anarchist/syndicalist trends with the onset of World War One who explicitly spurned social democracy's reformism and opportunism. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, they too failed to rally against World War One.

This thoroughly undermines the notion that the Second International's collapse had anything to do with reformism and Bernstein's revisionism either in practice or in theory since anarchist/syndicalist practice was nothing like the German Social Democratic Party's (they hated parliament with a passion).

On a related note, I take issue with the view that not only did Lenin in practice create a "party of a new type" in Russia but also "Marxism of a new type," which is the orthodox view among Marxists regarding Lenin's "break" with the Second International in 1914 and creation of the Third International in 1919. This epistemological break was first asserted in the writings of Lukacs and Gramsci in the 1920s but has little or no factual basis. The more time passed, the greater, deeper, and more profound Lenin's "break with social democracy" became, until finally Lars Lih's indisputable contention that Lenin was an orthodox social democrat for his entire political career has led to great controversy among Marxists.